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ENGLISH LITERATURE 



In tl}e J^eign of Fictoria 



WITH A GLANCE AT THE PAST 



HENRY MORLEY, LL.D. 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 
LONDON 



REPRINTED BY ARRANGEMENT FROM VOLUME 2000 OF THE 
TAUCHNITZ COLLECTION OF BRITISH AUTHORS 



WITH A FRONTISPIECE 



NEW YORK 
G. p. PUTNAM'S SONS 

27 AND 29 WEST 23D STREET 
1882 



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TO 



THEIR MOST GRACIOUS MAJESTIES 

KING ALBERT and QUEEN CAROLA 

OF SAXOXY 

^f)is Ualume 2000 is QctJicatetj 

AS A TOKEN OF RESPECT AND GRATITUDE BY THEIR • 
MAJESTIES' MOST FAITHFUL AND 
LOYAL SUBJECT 

TAUCIINITZ 



In publisliing the Two Thousandtli volume of my Series, the 
feeling deepest and strongest in my mind is that of gratitude to 
God for having permitted me to carry on my undertaking for 
the long period of forty years, during fifteen of which my 
eldest son Bernhard has supported me with the greatest loyalty 
and devotion. 

Many a great author, whose brilliant name is an ornament to 
the Collection, has during the lapse of time passed away ; and 
on this occasion, when I am, as it were, placing a memorial 
stone of my progress, the recollection of such losses comes 
home to me with peculiar poignancy. 

But though the dead are gone, their works remain ; new 
authors have joined the ranks ; and I am encouraged to hope 
that the Tauchnitz Edition will still proceed in its old spirit, 
and continue to fulfil its mission, by spreading and strengthen- 
ing the love for English Literature outside of England and her 

Colonies. 

TAUCHXITZ. 

Leipzifj, Deccmhcr 1881. 

V 



PREFACE. 



When Baron Tanclinitz asked me to write this little book, of 
which the design is his, he also wished me to include in it some 
record of the Literature of America. But the stability due to 
sustained earnestness of purpose in the publisher, and wide use 
by the public of the series of books now numbering two thou- 
sand, will give opportunity for other volumes that commemorate 
stages of progress. Baron Tauchnitz therefore cordiall}^ agreed 
to a suggestion that the kindred Literature of America, though 
we are proud in England to claim closest brotherhood with our 
fellow countrymen of the United States, has a distinct interest 
of its own, large enough for the whole subject of another 
memorial volume, and that an American author would best tell 
the story of its rise and progress. 

Let me be permitted to add of the Tauchnitz Collection, 
that I know no English writer who would not now be ready to 
congratulate its founder upon his success thus far in joining 
care for the higher interests of Literature with the diffusion 
of much healthy intellectual amusement. Writers as well as 
readers wish God Speed to the continuation of his work. 

n. M. 
Univeksity Collkge, London, 

November 23, 1881. 



CONTENTS. 



A GLANCE AT THE PAST. 
CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

From the Beginning to the Reigx of Elizabeth 1 

CHAPTER II. 
Fkom the Reign of Elizaketh to the Reigx of Anxe .... 25 

CHAPTER III. 
From the Reign of Anne to the Reign of Victoria 67 

IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 

CHAPTER IV. 

Of those who were old at the Beginning of the Reign; and 
OF the Poets, Wordsworth, Southey, Landor 99 

CHAPTER V. 

Journalists of the Elder Generation, Essayists and Poets . 135 

CHAPTER VI. 

Of Women who wrote in the Early Part of the Reign ... 151 

CHAPTER VII. 

Of those by whom Cheap Literature was jiade useful; and of 

the Earlier Life of Thomas Babington Macaulay . . . . IGG 

ix 



X CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

PAGE 

Of Writers who were between Fifty and Sixty Years old at 

THE Beginning op the Reign 200 

CHAPTER IX. 
Men of the next Decade of Years 220 

CHAPTER X. 
Of Thomas Carlyle, and of Divines and Wits 257 

CHAPTER XL 
Onward Battle 291 

CHAPTER XII. 
The best Vigour of the Time; and what remains of it ... 319 



FACSIMILES 

OF THH 

SIGNATURES OF AUTHORS 

IN 

THE TAUCHNITZ EDITION 

PHOTOGRAPHED 

FROM THEIR CORRESPONDENCE 

AND AGREEMENTS 

WITH 

BARON TAUCHNITZ. 
A FRONTISPIECE TO VOLUME 2000. 



O/ English Literatui 



Ill 



l^he ybllowins^, ivith a very few unavoidable exceptions^ forms a 
complete list of the contemporary A uthors who have contributed to the 
Tauchnitz Edition. 

Where several Facsi)niles belong to one and the same person^ they 
are placed together and enclosed betiveen two lines. In all such cases 
the Author is inserted in the alphabetical order under the name by 
which he first appeared in the Tauchnitz Edition. 

The American Authors are vtarked by a * before the continuous 
number in the inner margin. 

The date of each signature is given in the outer margin. 




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ADDENDA. 

Mrs. Ars^les is the author of " Molly Bawn." 

Miss Blind is the Editor of Shelley's works. 

Miss Charlotte Bronte wrote under the noin de guerre of 
Currer Bell. This signature is as an exception not from our 
own correspondence but we are indebted for it to Messrs, 
Sraiih, Elder, & Co. 

The three members of the Bukoer-Lytton family who have 
contributed to the Tauchnitz Edition are inserted in the alpha- 
betical order under Bulwer. Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer died 
as Lord Bailing. The present Lord Lytton published his 
early works under the nom de guerre of" Owen Meredith." 

Mrs. Charles is the Author of "Chronicles of the Schon- 
berg-Cotta Family." 

Miss Dickens and Miss Hogarth, the Editors of the letters 
of the late Charles Dickens, are added to Mr. Dickens. 

Mr. Alex. Dyce was the Editor of our second edition of 
Shakespeare. 

George Eliot was the nom de gnerre of Miss Evans. 

Mr. Ferdinand Freiligrath was the Editor of our edition of 
Coleridge. 

Mr. IJamerton is the Author of " Marmorne." 



XXXI X 



Afiss Iza Hardy is the Author of " Not easily Jealous." 

Mrs. Iloustoiin is the Author of " Recommended to 
Mercy." 

Mr. Utieffer is the Editor of Mr. Rossetti's Poems. 

Mrs. ////;// writes under the ;/c/// ^t'^v/^rn' of Averll Beau- 
mont. 

Mrs. Fanny E. A'in(;sLy, wife of the late Rev. Charles 
Kingsley, is the Editor of the Letters and Memories of his 
Life. 

Major Laivrence was the Author of "Guy Livingstone." 

Lord Macatilays signature appears first as it was before 
Her Majesty raised him to the peerage, and secondly after 
that dignity was bestowed on him. 

Lo7'd Mahon published most of his works under this name, 
until he became Lord Stanhope after the death of his father. 

Miss Helen Mathers is now Mrs. Henry Reeves 

Miss Florence Marryal is now Mrs. Francis Lean. 

Miss Dinah Maria Mnlock is now Mrs. G. L. Craik. 

Otiida is the novi de gnerre of Miss Louise de la Ramc. 

Miss Harriet Parr wvhe?. under the uom de guerre of Holme 
Lee. 

Mrs. Paid IS the Author of "Still Waters." 

Mr. Prior h the xA-uthorof " Expiated." 

Miss Piddington is the Author of " The Last of the Cava- 
liers." 

Mrs. Riddle's nom de guerre is F. G. Trafiford. 

Miss Roberts is the Author of " Mademoiselle Mori." 

Mr. Robinson is the Author of " No Church." 

Miss Stirling is now Mrs. MacCallum. 

Miss I'hacherayxsxvctw Mrs. Ritchie. 



Dr. C. von Tischendorf was the Editor of the New Testa- 
ment (vol. looo). 

Mark Twain is the noni de guerre of Mr. S. L. Clemens, 
Dr. C. Vogel was the Editor of vol. 500, " Five Centuries 
of the English Language and Literature." 

Mies Susan Warners nom de guerre is Wetherell. 
Mr. Charles Wood\% the Author of " Buried Alone." 
Ellen Wood is synonymous with Mrs. Henry Wood. This 
Lady also wrote under the nom de guerre of Johnny Ludlow. 



A GLANCE AT THE PAST 



OF 



EI^GLISH LITEEATUEE 



CHAPTER I. 

FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH. 

Worthy life of a Man has one high aim. It is so with 
the life of a Nation. Everyday's work, no doubt, must 
owe its form to the day's accidents ; but within the form 
breathes always the life itself, that changes only by ad- 
vance in knowledge of the path it means to tread. There 
is a single England and a single Germany, as truly as there 
is a single Englishman or German. They are twin nations, 
with a strong family likeness. Nevertheless they differ 
as brothers who live apart, each with his outward life 
determined by those accidents of position which cause 
also his individuality of thought and character to be more 
clearly marked. It is the purpose of this little book to 
tell as much as it can in a few pages of the spirit of Eng- 
lish Literature in that part of the reign of Queen Victoria 
which now belongs to History. Literature, of all things 
upon earth the most significant, is no chance feast of 
scraps, it is the best utterance of the mind of a people 
which has its embodiment in deeds set forth by the histo- 



2 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

rian. But the present thoughts of a man cannot be fairly 
interpreted without some knowledge of the thoughts that 
led to them. For men and nations, yesterday lives with 
to-day, and travels with to-day into to-morrow. Let us 
lighten, therefore, an attempt to understand a little of the 
present, by a very swift glance at the past. 

Before the coming of Teutonic settlers who gave Eng- 
land its name, there were Celts in Britain. Each of the 
two branches of the great Celtic stock contributed to the 
first peopling, and throughout the land national character 
is more or less tempered by a blending in various degrees 
of Celt with Teuton. The highest literature springs out 
of the hearts that are most deeply stirred. A struggle for 
independence, ending in a great defeat at the battle of 
Gabhra, assigned by tradition to the year 284, gave rise 
among the Gaelic Celts of Erin to their first great out- 
pouring of song. 

A like struggle was forced upon the Cymric Celts of 
Britain by incoming of the Teutons. As these spread 
inland from the eastern shore, on which they landed, their 
hold on the soil was contested, and here also there was 
a great defeat of the Celts closing a period of intense 
energy. King Arthur, if he ever lived, lived then as a 
Cymric leader. But echoes of the oldest song tell rather 
of Urien, a northern chief, whose bards were Taliesin, 
Llywarch the Old, Merddhin or Merlin, and Aneurin. 
Aneurin's " Gododin " was one long lament for the ruin 
of the British cause in the six days battle of Cattraeth, 
assigned by tradition to the year 570. 

From all points of the mainland opposite the eastern 
shores of England, by a natural process of migration, still 
at work though under milder forms of a more civilized 



OF ENGLISH LITERATUJIE. 3 

society, the Teutonic settlers came. To this day the 
marks are unmistakable of Scandinavian, Danish, and 
Frisian ancestry among the nations of those parts of 
England that are opposite the coasts of Scandinavians, 
Danes, and Frisians. 

Movements of the more energetic produced fusion of 
kindred settlements with kindred forms of speech. The 
old diversity being still represented by provincial dialects, 
there was shaped a nation with one language of its own, 
which took the name of one of the constituent tribes, and 
became thenceforth English. We now call that earliest 
form of English speech First English or Anglosaxon. In 
this language, and as early as the seventh century, at some 
time between the years 658 and 680, was struck the first 
note of an English Literature. 

Celtic missionaries were, in the north of England, bring- 
ing Christianity into the homes of the new settlers, when 
a poet known to us as Csedmon joined the religious house 
then formed at Whitby under Abbess Hilda. He joined 
Hilda's community and took his part in the good work by 
setting to the music of old northern heroic song parts of 
the Bible story used as means of quickening a simple faith 
in God. 

There is another large poem in First English, perhaps, 
in its English form, as old as Caedmon's Paraphrase, and 
in its original form, as a Scandinavian or Danish saga, cer- 
tainly older. In mythical record of the deeds of Beowulf 
this vividly represents the chief characters of the old 
northern life as it was when it began to lay foundations 
of the future strength of England. 

Out of the shaping energies that gave birth to a nation, 
while their impulse was yet fresh, these poems came. 



4 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

There were no later utterances of like force during the 
four centuries of Anglosaxon England. 

But the life of those four centuries ^Yas in their Litera- 
ture, with a clear voice of its own. From Bede, who was 
born when Csedmon lived and sang, to King Alfred who 
toiled to restore the broken forces of his country, and 
beyond the days of Alfred, the whole company of the First 
English writers laboured with one aim. Bede, devoted 
from childhood to the service of God, spent his life in the 
monastery at Jarrow in work and worship. All but the 
hours of prayer were hours of strenuous work for the in- 
crease of knowledge, and through knowledge of wisdom, 
among his countrymen. He crowned his literary life with 
an endeavour to tell faithfully the History of that shaping 
of England which was still in many of its details within 
living memories, within even each day's experience of 
living men. 

Such faithful labour for the spread of knowledge as was 
represented by the work of Bede, made England in the 
days of Alcuin a source of light even for the empire of 
Charlemagne. Alcuin, who was born about the time of 
the death of Bede, in 735, and who was bred from early 
childhood in the monastery at York, where he became 
librarian and schoolmaster, acquired fame as a teacher 
that caused Charlemagne, when he met with him, by 
chance, in the year 781, to draw him to his own court as 
a helper. It was a countryman of Alcuin, whose name 
suggests that he may have had Celtic blood in his veins, 
John Scotus Erigena, who made the first breach in the 
wall that parted theological from other teaching. The 
aim of the early schoolmen was, in one way or another — 
every way leading to frequent censure from the Pope — to 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 5 

be at the same time theologians and pliilosophers, but still 
with little or no question of established dogma. The first 
of the schoolmen was Erigena. With an Englishman, or 
Scot, this attempt at a forward movement of thought 
began in the ninth century, and in the fourteenth century 
it ended with an Englishman, when William Occam led 
his followers out of their cloisters to the open ground 
Avhere they breathed freer air, dealt boldly with realities 
of life, and took part, as Englishmen should, in the whole 
forward struggle of their day. 

Erigena died Avhen Alfred was king in England ; and 
the decay of learning caused by continued incursions of 
the Danes and Norsemen, who crossed over for plunder 
where they could not settle, had become now a disorganiz- 
ing force. Monasteries were the schools, the hospitals, 
the centres of civilization, in that early time. The reli- 
gious feeling made them, by constant endowment and gift 
of treasure, centres also of wealth. Wealth brought with 
it temptations, from within to indolence and luxury, and 
from without to plunder. There was check, therefore, to 
the flow of knowledge at its source. When Alfred endeav- 
oured to revive the monastery schools, Latin had fallen 
into disuse as the living tongue of the republic of letters, 
and one part of his work was the translation into English 
of these Latin books which he desired especially to keep 
alive as aids to the intellectual culture of his people. 

After Alfred's time, men with less breadth of thought 
sought to continue his work, and chief reliance was placed 
by Ethelwoid and Dunstan upon the enforcement of a 
strict monastic rule. Etlielwold, when Bishop of Winches- 
ter, had for a chief teacher in his diocese one of his old 
pupils at Abingdon, jElfric, known as the grammarian. 



6 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

He aided as grammarian in the attempt to revive Latin 
studies, and wrote Homilies on the days celebrated in the 
service of the church. Long afterwards, when war of 
creeds divided England, the Homilies of JElfric were re- 
ferred to as evidences of an uncorrupted form of doctrine 
in the Anglosaxon church. 

An undertone of religious verse in legends of saints, 
dialogues between Soul and Body, mythical properties of 
animals turned to religious allegory, by poets who ex- 
pressed in quiet strains the feeling of the country, ran 
through the literature of the Anglosaxon times. 

The Norman Conquest in the year 1066 brought no new 
race into the land. A difference of social conditions had 
developed differently in England and France the common 
elements of character, and thus, after the Norman Con- 
quest, the life of England was enriched with new political 
and social forms, which prepared the way for a more defi- 
nite expression of those natural antagonisms of opinion by 
which a free society sifts truth from error. 

It is most good that men should openly and generously 
differ in opinion. All admit that what we have we owe to 
the thought of the wisest in successive generations of the 
past. All admit that their own generation has to recon- 
struct what is outworn and contribute its own share of 
labour for the future. But each of us is, by bias of mind, 
so constituted that his opinions run more readily upon one 
of these lines than upon the other. One form of mind 
dwells more on the defence and conservation of those in- 
stitutions which have been transmitted to us by the wisdom 
of the past, defers more to established authority, and needs 
more evidence, before it can admit the fitness of a change. 
The other form of mind defers less to established authority, 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 7 

and is disposed indeed for a bold search after new aids to 
progress. In every matter of opinion, social, civil or reli- 
gions, argnment comes of action on each other by these two 
natural tendencies of thought. The best of our machines 
is useless while at rest, and this diversity of mind among us 
belongs to the working of that loom not made with hands 
on which the raw material of human life is spun into a 
thousand forms of truth. In English politics of the Reign 
of Victoria one of these natural tendencies of thought is 
named Conservative, the other Liberal. " Conservative " 
is a good, defining name ; but the other name should be 
" Reformer." 

There had been established the Saxon Chronicle, pro- 
viding for brief annual record of the chief incidents in the 
story of the land. A general habit of keeping monastic 
chronicles, with more or less reference to larger incidents 
of history beyond monastic bounds, was introduced into 
England by the Normans. A marked feature in such 
Chronicles is the quiet way in which their writers, who 
were usually monks drawn from the lower or the middle 
classes, spoke of public events ; not as they gave occasion 
for suggestions of the pomp of tournament, the grace of 
fair ladies, flutter of flag and sound of trumpet, but as they 
touched the substantial welfare of the people. 

The twelfth century was a time of vigorous development 
among the nations. Within a period nearly corresponding 
to the reign of Henry the Second in England, there was 
shaped for Germany the Nibelungenlied, for Spain the ro- 
mance of the Cid Campeador, and out of Flemish national 
life sprang the famous satire of Reinaert, Reynard the Fox. 
There was a like tendency in the literature of France, and 
in England those were days of the first development of 



8 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

Arthurian Romance. Geoffrey of Monmouth matched the 
chronicles of England with a chronicle of the old British 
kings, and crowned the race of British heroes with an 
Arthur upon whom at once imagination fastened. Thus 
there welled forth from among the dry ground of chroni- 
cles the first spring of romance in English literature. 

Arthurian romances, brought suddenly into fashion, 
reflected, in bright picturesque forms, at first chiefly the 
animal life of the time. But Walter Map, an Archdeacon 
and a chaplain to Henry II., put a soul into their flesh. 
From that day to this King Arthur, as the mythical 
romance hero of England, has been associated through- 
out English literature with the deep religious feeling of 
the country. 

In the reign also of Henry the Second, the King's con- 
test with Becket stirred the question of the limit of the 
Pope's authority, as it concerned the king. As it con- 
cerned the people, church authority of every form was 
at the same time brought into question by the effects of 
wealth and luxury upon the church. 

In the beginning of the thirteenth century, in the reign 
of King John, there was revival in England of a literature 
in the language of the land. Layamon, who read services 
of the church near Bewdley, turned Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth's chronicle, with new additions to its legend of 
King Arthur, into a long English poem. The " Ormu- 
lum," named after brother Orme its writer, endeavoured 
to give to the people, in pleasant rhythmical form, the 
series of gospels for the year, with a short homily upon 
each, for their instruction in religion. "The Land of 
Cockaygne," — Kitchen Land, — was a satire on the cor- 
ruption of religious orders. It painted a monks' Paradise 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 9 

of fleshly delight, which was to be reached only by wad- 
ing for seven years in filth of swine. 

Those evils which gave rise to such a satire, and the 
effect they had n2)on the people, caused Francis of Assisi 
and the Spaniard Dominic to found the orders of Francis- 
cans and Dominicans for strenuous labour to arrest decay 
within the Church. The Franciscans were to go poor 
among the poor as brothers, helping them to purity of 
life. The Dominicans were banded to maintain the purity 
of doctrine in the Church. Exclusion of books forced the 
Franciscans to look with their own eyes upon nature, and 
rescued them from bondage to conventional opinion. In 
the year 1224 Robert Grosseteste, a learned Suffolk man, 
who afterwards, as Bishop of Lincoln, led opposition to 
the Pope's misuse of Church patronage in England, be- 
came the first provincial of the Franciscans at Oxford. 
Roger Bacon, born in Somersetshire in 1214, with natural 
impulses that caused him to spend his patrimony in pur- 
suit of knowledge by aid of books and observation and 
experiment, became a Franciscan friar and, withdrawn 
from use of books, acquired a scientific knowledge far 
beyond that of his age. The results of his life's study 
were poured out at the bidding of the Pope within eigh- 
teen months of the years 1268 and 1269. 

Dante was then a child three or four years old. The 
sweet singing of Southern Europe, too much separated 
from the active energies of life, had dwelt upon love as a 
conventional theme, treated by courtly poets with more 
care for the music of language than for living truth of 
thought. The monasteries still claimed to be centres of 
culture, and if the monks, vowed to celibacy, might not 
sing, like other men, of love which was accounted the one 



10 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

noble theme, they could adapt the fashion to their use, 
and tell the world that when they sang a lady's praise, the 
lady was the Church, the Virgin, or some object of heav- 
enly regard. Habitual symbolism among many fathers 
of the Church had helped churchmen with a previous 
training to this use of allegory. The ingenuity of double 
sense added a charm to verse making, and taste for alle- 
gory spread. Guillaume de Lorris, a troubadour in the 
valley of the Loire, began, during the first thirty years of 
the century, an allegorical Romance of the Rose, that he 
left unfinished; and between the years 1270 and 1282, 
when Dante was a boy from five to seventeen years old, 
Jean de Meung finished it. Jean de Meung put so much 
of the bolder spirit of his time into the manner of his 
finishing, with satire against corruption in the Church and 
in Society, that the Romance of the Rose henceforth 
acquired wide fame and influence beyond the borders of 
its native France. 

By Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio there was developed 
throughout Europe a new sense of Literature raised into 
an art. When Dante died in 1321, aged fifty-six, Petrarch 
was a youth of seventeen, Boccaccio was eight years old, 
and the four great English writers of the fourteenth cen- 
tury were yet unborn. These writers, Geoffrey Chaucer, 
William Langland, John Gower, and John Wiclif, seem 
to have been all born within the ten or twelve years fol- 
lowing the death of Dante. In the year 1849, when the 
Black Death, the greatest of the Pestilences of the Four- 
teenth Century, spread into England, Chaucer, Gower, 
Wiclif, and Langland were young men ; Petrarch was 
about forty-five — his Laura Avas among the victims of 
that plague — and Boccaccio thirty-six years old. 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 11 

These pestilences meant that altliough literature was 
advancing, there was no advance whatever towards knowl- 
edge of the laws of health. Famine as usual preceded 
pestilence. In Florence, in April 1347, ninety-four thou- 
sand twelve-ounce loaves of bread were daily given to the 
poor to meet the urgent need. Children were dying of 
hunger in their mothers' arms. Plague spreading from 
the East was already in Cyprus, Sicily, Marseilles and 
some of the Italian seaport towns. In January 1348 it 
broke upon Avignon, where the Rhone was consecrated 
by the Pope that bodies might be thrown into it. In one 
burial ground in London fifty thousand corpses of the 
plague stricken are said to have been placed in layers in» 
large pits. We do not trust these numbers, but trust the 
impression that they give. It is said that by the Black 
Death Europe lost twenty-five million of her inhabitants. 
Into the crowd of the plague stricken at the H6tel Dieu, 
when the deaths were five hundred a day, high hearted 
women entered as Sisters of Charity ; and as they died 
at their posts, there was never a want of others to come 
in and take their places. Merchants, struck with terror, 
offered their wealth to the church. The deaths of own- 
ers of estates brought wealth to the religious houses, and 
made lawyers busy. But above all, the Plague believed 
to be a scourge for sin, was looked upon as God's call to 
repentance. Another sweep of pestilence, again preceded 
by famine, crossed England in 1360, another in 1373, an- 
other in 1382. It was said that of the plague of 1349 the 
poor were the chief victims, but that the plague of 1360 
struck especially the rich. It is from this plague that one 
of the great songs of England in the Fourteenth Century, 
Langland's Vision of Piers Plowman, had its origin. 



12 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

William Langland was associated, althougli not as 
ordained priest, with the service of the Church ; he was 
well read ; and he was a religious poet who felt deeply 
the griefs of the people. In the old unrhymed alliterative 
measure, then still familiar to the many, Langland pro- 
vided the wandering reciters of song and tale at fairs and 
festivals and by the wayside, wherever there was large 
resort of men, with a great allegory of the search after a 
higher life. This was " the Vision of Piers Plowman," in 
which Piers the Plowman, first appearing as one with 
the poor men of the earth, becomes identified with Christ 
himself. The pestilences that to Langland seemed to be 
God's warnings against sin, spoke through his poem with 
a deeply human voice of sympathy. He clothed the 
seven sins in homely shapes of a life familiar to the peo- 
ple, showed them repentant, sent them forth in search of 
the better life that would bring better days to England, 
and he taught that Christ in the person of Piers Plowman 
brought pardon from God to those who should do well. 

What Langland sought in his own way, John Wiclif 
also battled for. Langland was not a follower of Wiclif. 
They were men of like age and of like aim, with energies 
that had been stirred by the same social conditions ; fellow 
workers, each with his own well marked individuality. 
In Wiclif, as in others, the first efforts at reformation of 
the Church touched rather discipline than doctrine. But 
the end sought by reformation of the teachers was the 
better guidance of the taught, the lifting of the people 
out of brutish life. To more than one man, at this time, 
the conviction came that the Bible speaking to the people 
with its own full voice in their own tongue would be the 
best of guides. Work of translation, begun here and 



OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE. 13 

there, was shared and organized by Wiclif so effectually 
that four years before his death he and his fellow labour- 
ers had completed a translation of the Bible into English. 
Energy of thought in the Fourteenth Century struck 
with especial force upon the Papacy after the removal of 
the Popes to Avignon in 1309. A Pope who was depend- 
ent on the King of France could not be accepted as the 
master of the King of England. He was unwelcome to 
Englishmen in days when the personal ambitions of our 
Kings put enmity between the French and English. The 
seventy years of a Papal Court at Avignon were imme- 
diately followed by forty years of a schism in the Papacy. 
Griefs of the untaught poor, famine that was forerunner 
of another pestilence, grinding taxation for wars then 
alike unsuccessful and unjust, led in England to the Jack 
Straw rebellion of 1381. The discords of that year 
caused Chaucer's friend John Gower, a Kentish gentle- 
man of good estate, to write in Latin his best poem, 
" Vox Clamantis " the Voice of one Crying. Social miser- 
ies, he argued, do not come by chance, but are results of 
wrong. Of the ignorant mob he felt only that, because 
of its ignorance, it must be kept in subjection by superior 
force. He went through all the orders of society from 
Pope to ploughman, to point out the misdeeds of each ; 
and he set out upon his work with a prayer that summed 
up what should be the aim of every English writer : " Let 
my verse not be turgid, let there be in it no word of 
untruth; may each word answer to the thing it speaks 
of pleasantly and fitly, may I flatter in it no one, and 
seek in it no praise above the praise of God. Give me 
that there shall be less vice and more virtue for my speak- 
ing." But the one form of education by which Gower 



14 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

and all his contemporaries sought to raise the people, was 
only attainable through reformation of the clergy. The 
only education dwelt upon as means of fixing the un- 
stable multitude, and making it into the strong foun- 
dation of a happy commonwealth, was that which is given 
to his people by the worthy spiritual guide. The desire 
was to realize religion ; to humanize all lives by bringing 
them into accord with the pure Christian ideal. The first 
condition of a higher culture was repair of the broken 
plough. In the Fourteenth Century, therefore, and 
throughout the Fifteenth and Sixteenth, there was earnest 
labour for the Reformation of the Church. 

The two greatest English poets, Chaucer and Shake- 
speare, taught only through images of life. Towards the 
close of the Fourteenth Century, Gower in his English 
poem, the " Confessio Amantis," set a collection of tales 
in a light framework. He so arranged them in eight 
books that they were seven distinct volleys of shot against 
the seven deadly sins, and one against misuse of royal 
power. When Chaucer also followed the example set by 
Boccaccio's " Decameron," his tales were as far as Shake- 
speare's plays from any profession of didactic purpose. 
But like Shakespeare, Chaucer used the highest gifts of 
genius so that he might teach while he delighted. Nobody 
who has read Chaucer through, or who has fairly read 
through only the Canterbury Tales, can look upon Chau- 
cer as an animal poet. No man before Shakespeare dwelt 
as Chaucer dwelt upon the beauty of a perfect woman- 
hood, the daisy was for him its emblem, with its supposed 
power to heal inward bruises, its modest beauty, its heart 
of gold, and its white crown of innocence. He is not 
less deeply because unaffectedly religious. His absolute 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 15 

kindliness made part of his perception of the highest 
truth, and it increased greatly the power of his teach- 
ing. 

Lydgate and Occleve at the beginning of the Fifteenth 
Century maintained, as far as they had strength, the poet's 
office, to delight and teach. But their days were clouded 
with political confusion. There is nothing in wars be- 
tween families for the succession to a throne, or in wars 
of invasion for aggrandizement of the invader, that can 
set a people singing, or touch to the quick that better part 
of life which speaks through a true Literature. It is only 
war of minds, and bodies too if need be, for the truth, for 
liberty, for something that true men will rather die than 
lose, which fetches out the earnest voice of life. The Low- 
land Scot, most English of the English, who was able to 
say, thus far and no farther, to invasions of the Norman 
kings, did not want poets at a time when elsewhere Eng- 
lish Literature was among the victims of ignoble strife. 
Li Chaucer's latter time John Barbour, Archdeacon of 
Aberdeen, had blended many a touch of wisdom with a 
strain of liberty in his metrical Life of Robert Bruce, who 
died not fifty years before. The poem was half written 
in 1375. In the next century Blind Harry, a wandering- 
minstrel, with less art though with more appearance of art 
in the variety of measures, sang the romance of Wallace. 
When tales of Wallace were being thus chanted among 
the Scots, Robert Henryson, in 1462, became a graduate 
of the newly founded University of Glasgow. Robert 
Henryson, who was dead in 1508, wrote in his "Robin 
and Makyn " the first pastoral in English Literature. He 
moralized fables in verse with a shrewd Scottish humour. 
He wrote an earnest sequel to Chaucer's "Troilus and 



16 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

Cressida," and he left to us a small body of thoughtful 
and religious poetry. Before he passed away there had 
begun the great development of Scottish song that yielded 
in William Dunbar the next poet of great mark after 
Chaucer, and in Sir David Lindsay of the Mount the Scot- 
tish Poet of the Reformation. 

It is noticeable, however, that in the middle of the Fif- 
teenth Century, when England was bleeding from the 
wounds of Civil war, and the voice of her Literature was 
almost silenced, there were two writers who showed that 
the pulse of the nation had not stopped. Sir John For- 
tescue, who had been Henry the Sixth's Chief Justice 
and fought at Towton, went into exile with his master. 
Although himself cast out from a country where all seemed 
to be discord, he compared in France, for the instruction 
of the young Prince Avho might afterwards be king of Eng- 
land, the absolutist forms of the French monarchy with 
the limitations of the power of the king that had grown 
with the growth of English law. Days even of weakness 
and disorder had been made occasions for confirming and 
extending those constitutional rights upon which Fortes- 
cue dwelt. The other writer through whom we feel that, 
in those days of civil war, however blood might flow, the 
heart of England Avas still beating, is Reginald Pecock. 
The followers of Wiclif, known as Lollards, though with- 
out competent leaders, were battling still for a reformed 
Church. Forerunners of the later Puritans, they desired 
the clergy to look only to the Bible, to build up the church 
by founding it and all its ordinances upon scripture only 
as the Word of God, and to avoid human tradition and 
vain ceremonies that had, for many, turned religion into 
superstition. The Bishops were blamed for want of dili- 



OF ENGLISH LITERATUEE. 17 

gence in pretaching ; wealth of the clergy was condemned, 
and their encouragement of war, of oaths, of pilgrimages 
to the shrines of saints, invocation of saints, veneration of 
relics and of images, church ornaments and bells and ban- 
ners. Reginald Pecock, a busy writer and a Welshman, 
who became, in the middle of the Fifteenth Century, 
Bishop of Chichester, produced in English a large book 
of argument Avith the Bible Men called " the Repressor of 
Over Much Blaming of the Clergy." He came down 
among the people and in their own tongue sought by 
reason to convince them of what he believed to be their 
errors. He opposed constant appeal to the Bible on indif- 
ferent matters of Church discipline because God had given 
to men Reason to determine such things for themselves. 
Scripture, he said, was designed for revelation to man of 
that which was beyond and above reason. Both were 
gifts from the same source of all truth ; Reason and Faith, 
therefore, never really contradict each other. First prin- 
ciples on which to base the later doctrines of Religious 
Liberty were in the writings of this Bishop, whom the 
temporal and spiritual Lords of his own day immured for 
life in Thorney Abbey. They condemned him as one who, 
by preferring Reason to Authority in dealing with the 
people, had oifered to break down the strongest buttress 
of the Church. 

But throughout Europe in the Fifteenth Century there 
was a gathering of forces that gave impulse to the forward 
struggle. The fall of Constantinople in May 1453 scat- 
tered the learned Greeks, who taught abroad the ancient 
literature of their country and introduced Greek studies 
into Europe. Plato then came in aid of the battle against 
sensuality within the Church. Two years after the fall of 



18 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

Constantinople Gutenberg and Faust completed the first 
printed book. The sack of Mayence, in 1462, by its Arch- 
bishop Adolphus, dispersed the printers, and with them 
the secrets of their craft. Printing presses then were 
established in some of the chief cities of Europe. When 
William Caxton introduced the art of printing into Eng- 
land, and settled among the hand copyists at Westminster, 
he seemed only to be cheapening a luxury. His first pub- 
lications, in and after the year 1474, were such as the rich 
men, who alone could afford books, might be disposed to 
buy. But it was not long before full use was found for 
the new means of carrying on that conflict of thought by 
which society moves forward to the higher life that even 
now is attained only by a few. Besides these forces there 
came also in aid of the new birth of intellectual energy in 
Europe, the discovery of the New World. Columbus went 
to sea about the time when the printers of Mayence were 
first scattered. 

While men's imaginations were still being emboldened 
by these great discoveries. Sir Thomas More wrote his 
" Utopia." Somewhere about the New World was the 
Island of Utopia — Nusquama — Nowhere — discovered by 
one of the voyagers whom Amerigo Vespucci left behind, 
and whom More feigned that he had met at Antwerp. 
Wretched wars of ambition made in these days the chief 
business of the chief sovereigns of Europe. More, writing 
part of his little book in Brussels while a fellow lodger 
with his friend Erasmus, set forth under a transparent 
veil his condemnation of political and social evils in the 
England of his day, with playful aids to the perception of 
what a civilized community might be. 

On the 31st of October 1517, Martin Luther affixed to 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 19 

the church door at Wittenberg his 95 theses against Indul- 
gences. Wiclif and Huss were dead, but there remained 
the cause they battled for. Luther was turned to rebel- 
lion against the Pope's authority by the Pope's rebellion 
against Reason and Scripture. The papal legate Cajetan 
gave up attempt to bring Luther back into the state of 
passive obedience, and said, " I will not speak with the 
beast again ; he has deep eyes, and his head is full of 
speculation." Luther's translation of the Bible into Ger- 
man set William Tyndale upon the like work in England. 
Tyndale's New Testament was printed at Cologne and 
Worms in 1525, at Antwerp in 1526, and smuggled into 
England, with his tracts in aid of Church Reform. In 
1536 Tyndale was strangled and burnt at Antwerp. His 
last words were : " Lord, open the King of England's 
eyes I " In 1537 Miles Coverdale produced the first com- 
plete translation of the Bible into English, and it was 
admitted into England. Foundations of the future church 
establishment in England were then being laid. In May 
1533, a few months after his private marriage with Anne 
Boleyn King Henry VIII. was divorced from Katherine of 
Aragon. Their daughter Mary, afterwards Queen Mary 
of England, was then seventeen years old. In the follow- 
ing September Elizabeth was born* Henry YIII. having 
quarrelled with Rome over the personal question of his 
divorce from Katherine, in November 1534 the English 
Parliament made the King absolute master of the Church 
of England. In 1535, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, 
when an old man of 80, was beheaded because he could 
not take oath of assent to the king's new position in the 
English Church. Fisher was beheaded on the 22d of June, 
and Sir Thomas More, for a like reason, on the 6th of 



20 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

July. In the same year Hugh Latimer was made Bishop 
of Worcester. Coverdale's Bible was then in print, but 
it was dedicated to the king's "most dearest just wife 
Anne," and as Anne Boleyn was beheaded in May 1536, 
before these Bibles had been issued, the issue was delayed 
for the removal of the dedication. In 1537 the king's 
next wife, Jane Seymour, died after the birth of her son 
Edward. While attempts were being made to secure an 
English version of the Bible free from the objection laid 
against Tyndale's of Lutheranism in the manner of trans- 
lation, the English Church Reformers were still active in 
controversy. In 1539 — the year also of Thomas Crom- 
well's final act for the dissolution of Abbeys — the king, 
as Head of the Church, declared for all the practices 
against which objection was most frequent. The king's 
" Act abolishing Diversity of Opinion " caused Latimer to 
resign his bishopric and he was silenced during the rest of 
Henry VIII's reign. 

Meanwhile upon the continent the zeal of Calvin had 
been added to the zeal of Luther. On the 20th of Novem- 
ber 1541 Calvin's Ecclesiastical and Moral Code estab- 
lished at Geneva what was called "the Yoke of Christ." 
There was free use of authority to enforce doctrine and 
discipline, there as elsewhere. The reading of romances 
was forbidden. Three children were officially punished 
for stopping outside the church to eat cakes after service 
had begun. In 1568 a child was beheaded for having 
struck her parents. A lad of sixteen was sentenced to 
death for only threatening to strike his mother. The 
forms of earnestness in this and other controversies could 
in no man lie wholly outside the civilization of his time. 

On the 28th of January 1547 King Henry VIII. died, 



OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE. 21 

only a few days after he had signed the death warrant of 
one of the best poets of his reign, Henry Howard, Earl 
of Surrey. Though the Earl of Sm-rey had never been 
himself in Italy, he had joined his elder friend Sir Thomas 
Wyatt in adapting Italian and French verse measures to 
the English tongue. Through them the sonnet found its 
way into English Literature, and it was the Earl of Surrey 
who by translating two books of Vergil's ^neid into a 
form of blank verse then being tried in Italy, brought into 
English Literature the use, at first only a slight use, of a 
measure that was developed afterwards by the genius of 
Shakespeare and Milton into the noblest instrument for 
the expression of poetic thought. In Henry the Eighth's 
reign Italian influence, which, in the days of Chaucer, had 
been influence only of great writers on great writers, be- 
came an influence of court upon court, a spread of fashions 
from the source of fashion. 

The earnest undertone of English thought was in the 
fancies of the courtly poets who in the latter part of Henry 
the Eighth's reign followed the Italian fashions. Italians 
claimed all the great Latin poets as their ancestors ; in 
Italy the new foundations also of Modern Literature had 
been laid by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The free 
spirit from which that new power came was being enfee- 
bled by the rise of tyrannies. But the little tyrants played 
at literature, wrote verse, and gladly directed thoughts of 
eager minds from questions of political right to debate 
over the sonnets of Petrarch. It became a courtly fashion 
to write verse, and strain for ingenious daintiness of speech, 
known in England as the Euphuism of the Elizabethan 
time. Who could deny the right of Italy to lead Europe 
in Art and Literature ? Nowhere else in the world was 



22 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

the temper of the artist so distinctly to be found. Ariosto 
produced his Orlando in 1515, within Henry the Eighth's 
reign, and died in 1533, the year of the king's divorce 
from Katherine. Among the universities and courts of 
Italy there was in those days the birth of the modern 
drama. Pastoral poetry was finding a new voice. Scholar- 
ship was active. The year of Luther's birth was the year 
also of the birth of Raffaelle, and Ariosto and Michael 
Angelo were born within one half year of 1474-75. Some 
of the verses written in accordance with Italian usage by 
noblemen and gentlemen of the days of Henry the Eighth, 
Edward VI. and Queen Mary were collected, together with 
the poems of the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt, 
into a book commonly known as Tottel's Miscellany. It 
was published a few months before Elizabeth became 
Queen. The tone of these poems, although they can be 
playful, is never frivolous. The voice even of courtly 
English song, in those days of constant struggle over 
essentials of the higher life, accords with the spirit of a 
little poem by Lord Vaux, one of the number of the 
courtly singers : 

" Our wealth leaves us at death, our kinsmen at the grave, 
But virtues of the mind unto the heavens with us we have. 
Wherefore, for virtue's sake, I can be well content 
The sweetest time of all my life to deem in thinking spent." 

With the advance of scholarship came also new thought 
upon the principles of education. At the end of the Fif- 
teenth Century, Grocyn and Linacre had first taught 
Greek at Oxford. Among the Greek scholars at Oxford 
was John Colet, son of a rich citizen of London. He 
became in 1505 Dean of St. Paul's, and began in 1510 



OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE. 23 

the spending of his hirge private fortune on the founding 
of St. Paul's School. Sir Thomas Elyot, a Suffolk gentle- 
man, who served Henry VIII. as Ambassador, wrote both 
upon Education and upon Management of Health. His 
little book called "the Castle of Health," written with 
apology to the doctors for entering their domain, curiously 
applies the medical knowledge he had picked up from 
books then of authority to discussion of food and diet, 
and throws light upon the social customs of the day. It 
was 23ublished in 1533, two years later than his book 
called "the Governour," the most enlightened treatise 
on the education proper for a gentleman which had ap- 
peared up to that time in English Literature. Records of 
the foundations of public schools bear, indeed, clear wit- 
ness to the interest in education that formed part of the 
new birth of energetic thought. 

Only eight public schools were founded before the reign 
of Henry VI., one of them being Winchester College. In 
the reign of Henry VL, in 1441, Eton was founded. In 
the same reign three other schools were established, one 
of them being the City of London School, which was 
revived in 1834. In the reign of Edward IV. four schools 
were founded ; under Edward V. none. Under Richard 
III. there was one ; under Henry VII. there were twelve ; 
but under Henry VIII. the number of new school founda- 
tions was no less than forty-nine. The work went on with 
increased energy during the short reign of Edward VL 
when forty-four more schools were founded ; Christ's Hos- 
pital being one of them. Twelve schools were founded 
in the reign of Mary (there were not more during the 
whole of the long reign of George III.), and one hundred 
and fifteen under Elizabeth, including Westminster, Mer- 



24 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

chant Taylors', and Rugby. Charter-house was among the 
forty-eight schools founded in the reign of James I. Of 
the whole number of public schools founded from the days 
of King Alfred down to the present day, one half date 
from some year within the period from the accession of 
Henry VIII. to the death of Elizabeth. 

After the death of Henry VIII. there was a child king 
ten years old in the hands of the Church Reformers, who 
were energetic in securing the predominance of their 
opinion. Latimer, called into activity, preached before 
Edward VI. and before the court and people, with direct 
zeal against all unreformed abuses, not without condem- 
nation of the neglect of the plough in God's field by the 
prelates. The Devil, he said, is the busiest prelate in 
England, "ye shall never find him idle, I warrant you." 
Edward's short reign, from 1547 to 1553, was followed by 
the reign of his elder sister. Queen Katherine's daughter, 
Mary. By her the work of the reformers was over- 
thrown, the new doctrines and service books were de- 
prived of authority, strong efforts were made to restore 
the English Church to the communion of Rome, and on 
the 16th of October, 1555, Latimer was among those who 
were burnt for their opinions. On the 17th of November 
1558 Queen Mary died and her younger sister Elizabeth, 
Anne Boleyn's daughter, then twenty-five years old, be- 
came Queen of England. 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 25 



CHAPTER 11. 

FROM THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH TO THE REIGN OF 

ANNE. 

The whole population of England in the earlier years 
of Elizabeth's reign was below five million, and burning 
questions of the day caused wide divisions among these. 
If the best intellect among the people was on the side 
of Reformation in the Church, more than half of them 
were inclined to stand in the old ways. Among the Re- 
formers there was subdivision. John Hooper, who was 
burnt under Mary, had been sent to prison under Edward 
by way of conquering his strong objection to be made a 
Bishop if, as Bishop, he must wear the Bishop's robes. 
The controversy upon vestments that has never died out 
of the English Church of the Reformation, arose, like 
most other occasions of debate within its pale, out of the 
way in which the Reformation was established. On the 
continent the followers of Luther and Calvin drew to 
themselves, where they prevailed, prince and peasant. 
They had no difficulty in putting aside the whole cere- 
monial of Roman worship, and establishing the severe 
simplicity of a Church based upon no authority but that 
of Scripture. In England, when the Pope was set aside 
the King replaced him, and opinions or usages ordained 
by authority, were imposed, with frequent abrupt change, 
upon a country but half willing to accept them. Ed- 



26 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

ward's advisers had been afraid to stir violence of oppo- 
sition by conspicuous change in the outward appearance 
of church worship. The young Queen put in the place of 
Cardinal Pole, Matthew Parker as her first Archbishop 
of Canterbury, and with his help set about her work of 
establishing the Reformation in the Church of which she 
meant to be the Head. Matthew Parker was a pure- 
minded religious man, and a good student of the past. 
The Queen's policy, and the Archbishop's, was to find a 
middle way between the Roman Catholics and those re- 
formers against whom Pecock of old had reasoned, the 
Bible men, who in Elizabeth's time were first called Pre- 
cisians or Puritans. 

Elizabeth felt strongly the difficulty caused by discords 
among her people. Spain, richer by discovery of the 
New World, was a strong combatant for Rome, and little 
England, divided within itself, had from Spain certainly, 
perhaps from Spain and France together, an attack to 
face. Her desire for union among her subjects was often 
expressed. It was this feeling partly that caused her at 
the beginning of her reign to give such emphasis to the 
chance production of the first tragedy written in Englisli, 
" Gorboduc," or " Ferrex and Porrex," that its success 
opened the way to the development of the Elizabethan 
drama. The story taken by its young writers, Thomas 
Sackville and Thomas Norton, who produced it as an 
entertainment for Grand Christmas at the Inner Temple 
in 1561, was unquestionably chosen for expression of a 
thought dominant at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign. 
The first of the dumbshows before the acts, set forth the 
fable of the bundle of sticks which being divided were 
easily broken, but when bound together withstood all 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 27 

force from without. When the Queen heard of this play, 
she commanded that it should be acted again before her- 
self and her court ; and it was so acted, by the gentlemen 
of the Inner Temple, upon a great decorated scaffold in 
the Queen's hall in Westminster, on the 18th of Janu- 
ary, 1562 (new style). That was the birthday of the 
English drama. 

The first English comedy had, indeed, been produced 
by Nicholas Udall, the headmaster of Eton in Henry the 
Eighth's reign, between the years 1534 and 1541, when he 
made a free adaptation into English of the " Miles Glorio- 
sus " of Plautus as " Ralph Roister Doister," instead of giv- 
ing his boys, as usual, a Latin play to act. But there was 
nothing in the conditions under which that comedy was 
produced to cause wide imitation. It was otherwise with 
Gorboduc, produced in London before a large audience of 
cultivated men trained in the Universities, and emphasized 
by the Queen's special command for its repetition at West- 
minster. The Queen herself from that time regularly 
included plays written in English among court entertain- 
ments, and they were set forth, as masques had been, with 
some scenery. On the public stages, without scenery, en- 
tertaining stories of all kinds were freely dramatised and 
shown in action. 

The delight in plays spread, but for a long time the 
plays were, with few exceptions, of but little literary 
worth. For the next five and twenty years there was no 
great rise of the English drama. At court John Lyly pro- 
duced daintily ingenious pieces, classical and mythological, 
addressed only to cultivated audiences, George Peele dis- 
played in a court-play the grace of his genius, but on the 
whole, it may be said that from the year 1561-2, when 



28 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

Gorboduc was produced, to the year 1586, when it is proba- 
ble that Shakespeare came to London at the age of twenty- 
two, few plays of much literary value were produced. 
When William Shakespeare, eldest son of John Shake- 
speare, glover, of Stratford upon Avon, left his native town 
to try his fortunes in London, his father was a broken man, 
who had been struggling with adversity for the last eight 
years. William Shakespeare, born on the 23d of April 
1564, had married Anne Hathaway towards the close of 
1582. A daughter Susanna was born in 1583, and there 
were twins, Hamnet and Judith, in 1585. Li some way 
he must have been endeavouring at Stratford to support his 
wife and his three babies, when it occurred to him that he 
might earn more in London if he joined the players. He 
came as an unknown youth out of Warwickshire, and 
though born to become the world's greatest poet, there 
were six years of patient industry among the players, pren- 
tice years they may be called, during which he was only 
learning his art and finding his way to some little recogni- 
tion of his powers. But those were the first six years of 
a vigorous development of the Elizabethan drama. In 
1586 John Lyly's age was only 33, Peele was of about the 
same age, Thomas Lodge perhaps 28, Robert Greene, 
Henry Chettle and Thomas Kyd were young men of seven 
and twenty. Christopher Marlowe, a shoemaker's son who 
had been sent to Cambridge, foremost among them all in 
genius, broke into fame with his Tamburlaine at the time 
when Shakespeare joined the theatres, and he also was then 
but a young man of twenty-two or twenty-three. During 
the six years when Shakespeare was learning his art, Mar- 
lowe was running through his brilliant career, and with 
Lodge, Peele, Greene and others was producing a poetic 



OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE. 29 

drama, purely Elizabethan. At the end of those six years, 
in 1592, Shakespeare had produced little or nothing beyond 
such recasting of the plays of other writers as we have in 
the three parts of King Henry YI. Marlowe was killed 
in a brawl in 1593. During the six years from Greene's 
death to the year 1598, Shakespeare was putting forth his 
power, and there was no dramatist of mark to divide atten- 
tion with him. That was his harvest time. Within that 
time he was producing about two plays a j^ear. A list of 
twelve plays is given in a book of the year 1598 — Meres's 
" Palladis Tamia " — that bears witness to the pre-eminence 
he had by that time attained. He was then thirty-four 
years old, and in the preceding year had bought "New 
Place," one of the best houses in his native town. There 
remained five years of Elizabethan Drama before the death 
of Elizabeth. In these years Shakespeare continued his 
successes. But during these last five years of the reign a 
group of younger dramatists became active. Ben Jon- 
son's earliest comedy, ''Every Man in His Humour," was 
produced in its current form in 1598. Thomas Dekker, 
John Marston, Thomas Heywood also began writing in 
the last years of Elizabeth, and while Shakespeare was still 
writing, and rising in power, the English Drama reached 
its highest ground during the first ten or twelve years of 
the reign of James the First. Ben Jonson was then at his 
best, Beaumont and Fletcher joined the company of writ- 
ers. Ford, Massinger, Marston and others were then also 
writing. Causes of decay were already at work, but cer- 
tainly the full ripeness of the English drama was in those 
first years of the reign of James the First. 

We turn back to Elizabeth's endeavour to secure peace 
for her Church by taking a middle way between the strife 



30 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

of opposite opinions. Archbishop Parker died in 1575 
and was succeeded in his see of Canterbury by Edmund 
Grindal Archbishop of York. Grindal was in agreement 
with those Church reformers who laid stress upon study 
of the Bible, and faithful exposition of it by the clergy. 
He encouraged meetings of the clergy known as Prophe- 
syings for debate upon difficulties. The Queen held that 
if every minister considered it his duty to study the Bible 
for himself and express in sermons his personal opinions 
to his people, the issue of this could only be a splitting of 
the church into more forms of various opinion than there 
were already. She commanded Grindal to suppress the 
prophesyings, and to discourage independent preaching. 
She had adopted in 1559 the " Book of Homilies " issued 
in Edward the Sixth's reign, and added to this in 1563 a 
second Book of Homilies. Here, she thought, were ser- 
mons enough ; and if these were generally preached there 
would be throughout the country one harmonious body of 
instruction from the pulpits. Grindal could not obey the 
Queen's command to restrain his clergy in their search 
into the Scriptures. Therefore in 1577 he fell into dis- 
grace. He was restrained from exercise of the duties of 
his office, and was, until his death in July, 1583, Arch- 
bishop only in name. 

In 1577 when Grindal fell into disgrace, Edmund Spen- 
ser was a young man of about four and twenty ; he had 
proceeded to his M. A. degree at Cambridge the year 
before, and was then possibly a tutor in the North of Eng- 
land. In 1579 Spenser was in London, employed by the 
Earl of Leicester, the friend also of Leicester's nephew, 
Philip Sidney, who was of like age and in many respects 
like minded with himself. In that year Spenser published 



OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE. 31 

his first little book of verse, " The Shepherd's Calendar," 
and in it he not only followed the French poet Clement 
Marot in making pastoral eclogues speak desire for a pure 
church and unworldly ministers, but in doing so he clearly 
took his stand 'by the disgraced Archbishop Grindal. It 
was a characteristic opening to Spenser's literary life. No 
man ever set thought to sweeter music, and there are 
some who are content with a mere enjoyment of the out- 
w^ard charm of Spenser's manner, as if that were all. 
But Spenser was the Elizabethan Milton, Puritan like 
Milton with no narrow zeal against the innocent delights 
of life, but with grand yearning for the victory of man 
over all that opposed his maintenance of a pure soul obe- 
dient to God in a pure body obedient to the laws of Na- 
ture. Shakespeare was universal poet. He saw through 
the accidents of life to its essentials. But the accidents 
of his time are never out of Spenser's verse. He is a 
combatant poet. In his Faerie Queene, never completed 
though he was at work on it for more than fourteen years, 
he used a form of romance in which his time delighted, to 
show man through all his powers for good battling his 
way heavenward. Aid of divine grace the poet repre- 
sented, in the eighth canto of each book, by the inter- 
vention of Prince Arthur with his diamond shield. But 
while " the Faerie Queene " might be read simply as a 
spiritual allegory based on Christian doctrine, alike appli- 
cable to all times, the general allegory is expressed through 
constant indication of the particular battles of the poet's 
own day. But the strife it tells of, with its aim un- 
changed whatever the shifting scenery of conflict, lasts 
through all generations till we reach the crowning race of 
man. The poet sought to put his genius to the highest 



32 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

use. Amusers of a clay the day rewards, and their reward 
ends with the day. Only the helpers live. 

Spenser was a young child when John Knox returned 
from Geneva to Scotland, and prospered so well in his 
work that, on the 17th of August 1560, the Estates of 
Scotland embodied his opinions in a Confession of Faith 
for the Scottish Church. The Scottish Reformation was 
established in accordance with the view of those who pre- 
ferred church government by Presbyters and Elders to 
what they looked upon as the less scriptural rule of Bish- 
ops. The Puritan view that prevailed in Scotland was 
in England also very strongly represented. In the third 
year of Elizabeth's reign, when it was moved in Convo- 
cation of the Church that Saints' Days should be abol- 
ished ; that in common prayer the minister should turn 
his face to the people ; that the sign of the cross should 
not be used in baptism ; that kneeling at the sacrament 
should be left to the discretion of the minister ; that or- 
gans should be removed ; and that it should suffice if the 
minister wore the surplice once, provided that he minis- 
tered in a comely garment, there was a large majority of 
members present, including Dean Nowell, the author of 
the Church Catechism still in use, who voted for these 
concessions. The numbers were fifty-three to thirty-one, 
but proxies changed the balance of the votes and gave a 
majority of one against the Puritans. Of eighty-five edi- 
tions of the English Bible published in Elizabeth's reign, 
sixty were of the Geneva version, preferred by the Puri- 
tans. The fierce spirit of conflict with Rome was not 
wanting in its preface, nor indeed were Roman Catholics 
free in Elizabeth's reign from cruel persecution, even to 
torture and death. But the fierceness, though it might 



OF ENGLISH LITEBATUEE. 33 

breathe desire to hew Agag in pieces before the Lord, 
was chiefly spent in spiritual contest \vith a cruel tyranny. 
In 1567 there was established the Council of Blood in the 
Netherlands; and in February 1568, all the inhabitants 
of the Netherlands were condemned to death, by sentence 
of the Inquisition, except a few who were named. In a 
letter to Philip, Alva estimated at 800 the executions in 
Passion week. In the following year Edmund Spenser, 
then passing from school to College, contributed to a reli- 
gious book published by a refugee from the Low Coun- 
tries. In 1572 there was in France the Massacre of St. 
Bartholomew. Spenser was then a youth of about nine- 
teen, and young Philip Sidney was in Paris at the time. 
In 1573 there was the siege of Haarlem, with 300 women 
among the defenders of the town. At Haarlem there was 
a treacherous slaughter of two or three thousand ; three 
hundred were tied back to back and drowned in the lake. 
Alva, recalled by his own wish in December, boasted that 
he had caused 18,600 Netherlanders to be executed. This 
was the year in which Spenser took his Bachelor of Arts 
degree. In 1579 William of Nassau was nominated 
Stadtholder of Holland, and in July 1581 there was the 
Dutch Declaration of Independence. In 1585-7 there was 
the expedition of Leicester in aid of the struggling Prot- 
estants, during which, on the 22d of September, 1586, Sir 
Philip Sidney, noblest type of the young Elizabethan 
Englishman, Avas killed at Zutphen. As Athens rose to 
her highest point during the struggle with Persia, so the 
effect of this struggle for life and freedom upon the Dutch 
provinces engaged in it, was their prosperity. Old towns 
became larger, and new towns were built ; the ports of 
the free states were filled with shipping. In these days, 



84 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

Moscow, Constantinople and Paris were the three largest 
capitals. The London of Elizabeth, astir with highest 
life, was a town of about 160,000 inhabitants. But when 
the whole power of Spain was gathered against her, Eng- 
land, stirred to the soul, poured out her highest energies. 
The land was full of music. With the soul of Freedom 
for its Prospero, 

This isle was full of noises 

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. 

Still there were courtly singers. Sir Walter Raleigh struck 
boldly with his privateers at wealth of Spain upon the 
seas, and sang praise of his Queen. Sidney was poet, and 
wrote a "Defence of Poesy," the first piece of English 
criticism that looked through the letter to the spirit of 
good literature. Sidney's nearest friends were Fulke 
Greville and Edward Dyer, poets both. It was Dyer 
who sang 

My mind to me a kingdom is, 

Such present joys therein I find, 
That it excels all other bliss 

That earth affords or grows by kind : 
Though much I want which most would have, 
Yet still my mind forbids to crave. 

All the dramatists were lyric poets, for the greater must 
include the less. He is no dramatist who cannot write a 
song. Not only the greater poets, as Spenser and Shake- 
speare, but singers like Thomas Watson and Henry Con- 
stable who aspired no higher, scattered sonnets. Elizabeth 
herself wrote rhymes, and so did James of Scotland. The 
luxury of fancy spent itself on dress, and played ingenious 
tricks upon language, following Italian example that then 



OF ENGLISH LITEEATUBE. 35 

spread through all the literature of Europe. But the 
strain for antithesis, alliteration and far-fetched ingenuity 
of simile, was nowhere so pleasantly successful as in 
England, where it took its name of Euphuism from the 
title of a book of John Lyly's. And Lyly's "Euphues," 
published in 1579, while written in the dainty fashion that 
was to make it acceptable, was deeply earnest in its pur- 
pose. It sought to enforce among the rich such care for 
education as had been shown in 1570 by Roger Ascham's 
"Schoolmaster," — the next famous book upon education, 
after Sir Thomas Elyot's *' Governour," — and a regard for 
religion not enfeebled by the lighter fashions of the day. 

Through all home discords, fellowship in a common 
danger from without held England and Elizabeth in strong 
accord until after the defeat of the Spanish armada. 
Struggle between the two different types of thought, which 
had arranged nations of Europe into opposite camps, be- 
came then less urgent on a European question, and atten- 
tion was transferred to the home controversies. These 
also turned chiefly upon questions of holding by author- 
ity and the traditions of the past, or giving a new range 
to thought and building for the future. The Queen also 
was unmarried and had no direct heir to her throne. 
Of more than twelve possible claimants to the succession 
she would not name one. It was enough for her that 
quiet arrangements were made to secure the throne after 
her death to James of Scotland. With many claimants to 
the throne and no declared successor, it was commonly 
feared that the divided land would be again weakened by 
civil war. It is for this reason that the two best heroic 
poems of Elizabeth's later time made it their theme to 
paint the misery of civil war. Daniel published, in 1595 



36 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

and succeeding years, his poem on "the Civil Wars of 
Lancaster and York." Drayton followed in 1596 with his 
poem on "the Lamentable Civil Wars of Edward the 
Second and the Barons." Even Shakespeare had begun 
in those latter days with work upon plays that had civil 
war for their theme. The three Parts of Henry VI. were 
probably produced in 1592, and a bad version of the second 
of these plays was printed in 1594 as " the First Part of the 
Contention betwixt the Houses of York and Lancaster." 
Thomas Lodge also, among the dramatists, dealt with the 
same theme when he produced his play of "the Wounds 
of Civil War, lively set forth in the true tragedies of 
Marius and Sylla," first printed in 1594. 

Under James the First there was not only, during the 
first ten or twelve years of the reign, the time of the full 
ripeness of the English drama, preceding the several stages 
of its swift decay, but the energies aroused under Eliza- 
beth gave impulse to a great advance of thought in the 
domain of Science. Francis Bacon was about three years 
older than Shakespeare, whom he outlived ten years. 
Bacon lived through the whole of the reign of James L, 
which contains all his maturest work. He had not thriven 
to his mind in Elizabeth's reign ; but he rose rapidly under 
James. He lived by law and loved philosophy. As lawyer 
Bacon rose to be Lord Chancellor, and as philosopher he 
gave the strongest impulse to a sound method of experi- 
mental search into the secrets of Nature. His dispassion- 
ate experimental method failed when applied to life. The 
emotions have their part with intellect and will in shap- 
ing human action, and on critical occasions Bacon failed 
for want of that impulse which has no part in the work 
of philosophical research but assists in determining the 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 37 

healthy acts of men in their common relations. As a 
thinker Francis Bacon fastened even at College npon the 
idea which it was his life's work to develop. He wished 
that philosophers, instead of turning their Avits round and 
round upon themselves, would use the mind as a tool with 
which to hew out truth from the great quarry of nature 
and shape it into use for man. From any observed facts 
in the world about us, let us by thoughtful experiment 
find our way in to the knowledge of the law that governs 
them. But after the law had been found by this induc- 
tive method, there followed the carrying out of the main 
purpose of Bacon's system, and that was, to deduce from 
the law practical application of it that would enlarge the 
dominion of man. When Franklin began search into the 
unknown cause of thunder and lightning by sending up 
his kites into a thunderstorm, there was beginning of in- 
ductive experiment ; and when, through experiment after 
experiment, there came knowledge of electricity and of 
the laws under which it acts, deduction followed. Thus 
through one only of the many ways of employing the new 
force, the electric telegraph, an invention as important as 
that of the mariner's compass, has enlarged the powers of 
man. Such discoveries. Bacon argued, instead of being 
made at rare intervals by accident, would be made fre- 
quently as the result of definite inquiry, if men followed 
the methods of the New Organon, which he opposed to 
the Organon of Aristotle. There may have been nothing 
new in Bacon's teaching, but in him the energy of the 
time put it into the mind of the man who was in force of 
intellect second only to Shakespeare, to apply himself with 
all his might to the enforcement of the great central -pTm- 
ciples of true research in science. The teaching of Bacon 



38 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

set men who had scientific tastes inquiring. In the days 
of Charles the Pirst there were little communities, at 
Oxford and at Gresham College in London, of men who 
were seeking the advance of knowledge by experiment, as 
Bacon counselled. The movement gathered strength, and 
one issue of it was the founding in 1662 of " the Royal 
Society for Improving Natural Knowledge," which is to 
this day in England the great public expression of the 
Fellowship of Science. 

Science was born again, while the poetical drama passed 
into decay. Like causes had been at work to make the 
days of Elizabeth and James the great period alike of 
English and of Spanish Drama. Spanish plays, when 
they were not on sacred subjects, founded their j)lots 
commonly on complications of intrigue, in which animal 
love was the motive power. Influence of the Spanish 
Drama became marked in France, and it advanced to 
England. Under Elizabeth, dramatists great and small 
made plays of tales that touched humanity in all its 
forms. Shakespeare still did so in the reign of James I., 
and so, in his own way, did Ben Jonson, but among other 
men there was an almost general acceptance of the fashion 
of the time. The plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, were 
all first produced in the reign of James. Apart from 
Shakespeare's there are none which contain finer strains 
of imaginative verse ; but there is no longer, in the choice 
and management of the plots a range wide as all the 
interests of man. Usually also it is not love on which 
the plots turn, but a sensual passion that mistakes its 
name. The Puritans began war against plays chiefly 
because they were at first acted on Sundays. After that 
cause of contention ceased, there remained no very sub- 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 39 

stantial ground of offence. Shakespeare wrote for audi- 
ences that represented fairly the whole body of the 
English people. But when the matter of the plays lost 
wholesomeness there was a gradual desertion of the play- 
houses by men who represented no small part of the best 
life of England. This lowered the tone of the audiences. 
The stage reflects only the world before the curtain and 
within the playhouse walls. When, therefore, the audi- 
ence sinks below a fair representation of the whole life 
of the country, the plays sink with it. In Ben Jonson's 
relation with the stage we find vigorous illustration of 
this process of decay. He could not refrain from expres- 
sions of contempt for audiences out of which the large life 
of humanity was gone. Turning, at last, from "the 
loathed stage," with an ode pouring fierce scorn upon the 
men who called themselves its critics and its patrons, who 
discussed each day " something they call a play," he said 
of them 

If they love lees, and leave the lusty wine, 
Envy them not, their palate's with the swine. 

That ode was written in the year 1630, only fourteen 
years after the death of Shakespeare. 

There was decay also in the versification of the plays. 
Marlowe had brought blank verse into use as the measure 
of dramatic poetry. Shakespeare had brought it to per- 
fection. With increased familiarity there had come in- 
creased freedom in its use. With many dramatists in 
Shakespeare's latter day, freedom of use meant often care- 
less use. During the reigns of James I. and Charles I. 
the carelessness was more habitual. At last the decline 
was general, and when the drama was revived, after the 



40 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

Commonwealth, those who tried to write blank verse pro- 
duced usually prose hacked into bad lengths. The art of 
writing blank verse was extinct, and critics were pretty 
well agreed to give up its use in the drama. No great 
use had ever been made of it in other forms of poetry. 
But just when this was settled, Milton produced in blank 
verse "Paradise Lost," and upon that rock the critical 
cockboats came to pieces. 

There was decay even in the polite forms of ingenious 
speech. Elizabethan Euphuism lost its fresh elastic life, 
the strain that still was healthy strain of a quick wit. 
The strain remained, painfully showing itself in stiff- 
jointed struggles for agility. The later Euphuism was 
laboured, obscure and pedantic. What we called in Eng- 
land Euphuism was a form of writing that spread out of 
Italy to France and Spain as well as to England. The 
fashion being artificial could not last, and the manner of 
its decay was the same throughout. In Italy, Spain, 
France, England it was passing at the same time through 
like stages of decay. While Donne stands for type of the 
change in English Literature, its type in Italy is Marino, 
in Spain, Gongora. Our Euphuists were contemporary 
with a corresponding school of poets called in Spanish 
Literature the Conceptistas, and our Later Euphuists, 
whom Samuel Johnson afterwards called " metaphysical 
poets," were contemporary with a school of Spanish poets 
called the Cultos, who, like our later Euphuists, mightily 
affected culture. Culture! The aim of culture is to 
bring forth in their due season the natural fruits of the 
earth. 

But the deep religious life that has never died in the 
English people, and is the strength of many opposite 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 41 

forms of opinion, found expression still, whatever the out- 
side dress in Avhich fashion had clothed it. Even in 
Donne's poetry that inner grace of thought makes itself 
felt through the misfitting dress of words that cumbers it. 
The poems of George Herbert's " Temple " were written 
in 1630-33 during the three last years of his life, when he 
was rector of Bemerton, housed in a damp hollow and 
slowly dying of consumption. These poems have all the 
outward features of the later Euphuism, but the living 
soul of the poet has struck its own fire into them all. As 
the flesh was sickening and dying, the spirit rose in health 
and life. Herbert represented the English church as 
loved by those who were most ready to find emblems in 
aid of spiritual life in that form of ceremonial against 
which the Puritans contended. But no form of opinion 
has ever dulled the English reader's sense of the pure 
spirit of devotion that breathes out of George Herbert's 
singing. His " Temple " had so great an effect upon 
men's minds, that it gave rise to a little school of poets 
who avowed themselves his followers and imitators. Best 
of the group and nearest to his master, whom he some- 
times equalled, Henry Vaughan, was, like Herbert him- 
self, a Welshman. 

There was decay also under James I., or tendency to 
decay, in the old sense of the relation between Crown and 
People. Elizabeth had felt like an absolute queen, and 
had stretched her prerogative. The people believed that, 
" divinity cloth hedge a king," and with the Queen, true 
Englishwoman, whatever her faults, it was Elizabeth for 
England and not England for Elizabeth. With her suc- 
cessor it was rather England for James than James for 
England. Such a king soon brought into question the 



42 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

limits of royal authority. Locke has observed that liberty 
is apt to suffer under a good sovereign, because the trust 
of the people goes with every undue use of the royal 
power. The motive and the end are held to justify the 
means. But when a weak rule follows, ground has to be 
recovered upon which the Sovereign can no longer be 
trusted. Then may come strife. The question of the 
limit of authority extended, therefore, in the reign of 
James the First from Church to State. 

One of the Church questions agitated in those days 
touched the divine authority of Tithes. John Selden, 
trained to the law, was, among all of his time, the one 
man most learned in what we now call the constitutional 
history of England. He took for his motto a Greek sen- 
tence meaning " Above all things. Liberty." He was an 
antiquary who distinctly valued study of the past as giv- 
ing, " necessary light to the present," and who spoke of 
"the too studious affectation of bare and sterile antiquity" 
as " nothing else than to be exceeding busy about noth- 
ing." Among the books written by Selden that brought 
a knowledge of the past to bear upon interpretation of the 
present, was one, published in 1618, on " the History of 
Tithes." His purpose, he said, was not to take any side in 
the argument for and against their divine institution, but 
to bring together a narrative of facts and leave readers to 
use them as they pleased. Selden's facts bore very dis- 
tinctly against that principle of divine authority which 
King James cherished in church matters as an outwork 
for defence of the great keep in which he himself dwelt. 
He had Selden before him, reasoned with him, brought 
him before the High Commission Court, ordered a confu- 
tation of his book to be written, and said to him, " If you 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 43 

or any of your friends shall write against this confutation 
I will throw you into j)rison." It was in the same year 
that James caused Sir Walter Raleigh to be executed for 
the satisfaction of the King of Spain. In 1621 the King 
came into conflict with his Parliament. Being offended 
at advice from Parliament, he told the House of Commons 
that its privileges were held from the Crown, were " rather 
a toleration than inheritance," and that if members forgot 
their duty they would be disallowed. The House of 
Commons took counsel with John Selden, and in accord- 
ance with his evidence entered a protest on its journals 
declaring that, "the liberties, franchises, privileges, and 
jurisdiction of Parliament are the ancient and undoubted 
birthright and inheritances of the subjects of England." 
King James at a Privy Council sent for the Commons' 
journal and with his own hand erased that entry. Then 
he dissolved the Parliament, imprisoned some of its mem- 
bers, and placed Selden in custody of the Sheriff. When 
afterwards, at the close of his reign, James was obliged to 
summon a new Parliament, John Selden entered it as 
member for Lancaster, and he contributed his scholarship 
to the contest against exercise of absolute authority by 
Charles the First. 

When James the First died, John Milton, a youth of 
seventeen, went from St. Paul's school in London to 
Christ's College, Cambridge. The land was at that time 
full of song, and the English still were, as they had been 
since the days of Henry VIIL, distinctly a musical nation. 
In Elizabeth's reign part of the common furniture of a 
barber's shop was a pair of virginals on which a customer 
could play while he was waiting to be trimmed. It re- 
quired no special preparation to strike up, in a chance 



44 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

company of friends, catches, madrigals, and part songs. 
Skill in song writing was an attainment that became the 
man of fashion, and perhaj^s there was no period in which 
song writing had a larger place in English Literature than 
the reign of Charles the First. Men who in earlier times 
would have written many plays and a few songs, now 
wrote one or two plays and many songs. Songs of the 
cavaliers sometimes glorified the drunkard and the light- 
o'-love, in playful strains that were meant only as a gay 
form of defiance to the Puritan. Among men of less wit 
the same antagonism only made the descent easier to fel- 
lowship with Gryll. 

In such times Milton, after seven years of study at 
Cambridge, had withdrawn to his father's house in Hor- 
ton, a village near Windsor and Eton, and was labouring 
to fit himself for high use of what talent he had as a poet. 
He had closed his sonnet of self-dedication, at the age of 
twenty-three, with a resolve to which he was, throughout 
his after life, as true as man can be : 

All is, if I have grace to use it so, 
As ever in my great task-master's eye. 

Milton was in his twenty-fourth year when he went home 
to Horton, and remained there until he was within eight 
months of the age of thirty. At Horton he wrote L' Al- 
legro and II Penseroso, Arcades, Comus and Lycidas. 
" Arcades " was a slight domestic masque written for the 
family of the Earl of Bridgewater, to be used as an ex- 
pression of family affection. Comus was a state masque, 
written to be presented at Ludlow Castle by the Earl of 
Bridgewater, when he gave, as representative of the sov- 
ereign, a grand entertainment upon coming into residence 



OF ENGLISH LITER ATU RE. 45 

as Lord President of the West. It was produced in the 
great hall at Ludlow Castle on the 29th of September 
1634, and must have been written not later than in the 
preceding spring, to allow time for the writing of the mu- 
sic to the words, the learning of parts, preparation of 
elaborate scenes and masks, and requisite rehearsals. In 
the preceding year, 1633, a Puritan lawyer, William 
Prynne, author of many books maintaining the less liberal 
form of Puritan opinion, published his " Histriomastix," 
which denounced stage plays, masques and dances in un- 
compromising terms. The chief actors in masques were 
members and friends of the family that gave the enter- 
tainment. The Queen herself took part in the Court 
Masques, and there arose outcry against Prynne that 
passages in his book were a direct insult to the Queen. 
Prynne published his book about Christmas 1632. On 
the first of February 1633 (new^ style) Prynne was com- 
mitted to the Tower. He was there kept prisoner with- 
out bail. Information was not exhibited against him in 
the Starchamber until June 1633, and the sentence of the 
Starchamber was not pronounced until February 17, 1634. 
It was, that Prynne should pay a fine of £5000, be ex- 
pelled from his Inn, disbarred, deprived of his Oxford 
degree, set in the pillory at Westminster and Cheapside, 
and in each pillory have one of his ears cut off. Though 
many of the Lords did not expect that such a judgment 
would be executed, and the Queen interceded, there was 
no remission, and Prynne was pilloried on the 7th and 
10th of May 1634, either while Milton was writing 
" Comus" or when he had just finished it. 

That Milton, who was, like Spenser, in the best sense 
of the word, but in none of its narrower senses, Puritan, 



46 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

should precisely at this time be asked to write a masque 
and accept the commission, is worth notice. The Inns of 
Court spent an unusual sum upon a masque, as a loyal 
way of repudiating the opinions of the disgraced lawyer. 
Some like feeling of loyalty may have caused the Earl of 
Bridgewater to grace his entertainment with a masque 
that required costly preparation. Milton was then in his 
twenty-sixth year, and with a just sense of the poet's 
office, he showed that through masque or play as purely 
as through psalm or hymn the true music of life could be 
expressed. Without a touch of churlish controversy, or 
one word that could check innocent enjoyment of the fes- 
tival to which he added new delight, he made his delight 
consist in a setting forth of the victory of temperance 
over excess, of the true spirit of purity over the sensual 
debasement of the flesh. The charming rod of Comus 
that must be reversed before his power is destroyed, ena- 
bles the spirit of unlicensed mirth to cause things to seem 
other than they are. When the fashion of the time saw 
only hospitality in him who forced his friend down to the 
level of the swine, Comus had cast his spells into the 
spungy air, of power to cheat the eye with blear illusion. 
When Sabrina, nymph of the Severn, was raised to release 
the lady from the chair of Comus to which she was bound 
by her magic art, it was Sabrina, because the Severn was 
the river most familiar at Ludlow. From any other river 
Milton might have raised a waternymph to typify the 
spirit of Temperance that must arise to break the social 
spells of a bad custom. Comus escaped. His wand was 
not reversed. He lived on to become God of the English 
Court in Charles the Second's time. Only in our day we 
have seen his wand reversed. 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 47 

As the old question of the limit of authority became 
more and more urgent, and conflict of argument was 
blended with conflict of bodily force, above the tumult of 
civil war there rose upon every side the voices of the lead- 
ers in the war of thought. By thought alone the issues 
would be finally determined. The chief philosopher of 
the time, Thomas Hobbes, reasoned out the position of the 
citizen, and nature of the Body Politic. He argued that, 
like the body natural, the body politic must needs be, for 
its own well being, in absolute subjection to a single head. 
Such a head, he said, is the king, constituted by a society 
of men naturally equal, who give up to a central authority, 
for their own better preservation, some part of the right 
inherent in each one. Sir Robert Filmer, a loyal gentle- 
man of less intellectual mark, acquired prominence by 
arguing that Hobbes conceded too much when he based the 
absolute authority of kings upon a social com23act among 
men naturally equal. Men, he said, never were naturally 
equal. First there was Adam. When Eve followed, 
Adam was master. When sons were born, their father 
was their superior. Out of the divine ordinance of father- 
hood Sir Robert Filmer drew the origin of an authority in 
kings received from God alone. When the king's cause 
was lost, conflict of thought was only the more active. 
The king was tried, condemned, and executed for treason 
against his people. Was there indeed a reciprocal obliga- 
tion, and could a king as well as a subject become guilty 
of the capital offence of treason? Milton had taken no 
part in the physical struggle, he was one who, as he said, 
" in all his writings spoke never that any man's skin should 
be grazed." His part was with those only who ranged 
thought against thought for the defence of a just liberty. 



48 A GLANCE AT THE FAST 

From the outbreak of the Civil war to the settlement ot 
the Revolution was a period of about five and forty years. 
The man of five and twenty had seen all its changes by the 
time he reached three score and ten, and lived through 
the din of all the conflicting arguments of all the parties. 
Whatever the outward changes that went with it, all was 
one continuous effort to find for England a solution of the 
problem of the limit of authority, so far as that was to be 
done by settling the relations between Government and 
People. The Commonwealth was an experiment in that 
direction. Really sustained by the vigour of a single man, 
all seemed to be sound while Cromwell governed. Opin- 
ion was freely expressed, in many forms, as to the best 
constitution of a state. Thomas Hobbes published in 1651 
his " Leviathan," the chief embodiment of the old argu- 
ment for an absolute sovereign ; James Harrington pub- 
lished in 1656 his " Oceana," the first plea in English 
Literature for vote by ballot after the manner of the Vene- 
tian republic, filling every office of the state by free elec- 
tion, with frequent return of the elected to a testing of 
their continued fitness by a fresh dependence on the votes 
of their constituents. Milton's tract on "the Tenure of 
Kings and Magistrates " dealt with the essential principle 
in contest, and reasoned against irresponsible power. The 
indictment of England before Europe, written in 1649 by 
Claude Saumaise, Selden was asked to answer, but Selden 
pointed to Milton, knowing well that, in the pleading of 
such a cause before the world, acuteness in applying knowl- 
edge of the past to uses of the present needs to be quick- 
ened by the fervour of a high minded enthusiasm. Milton 
therefore wrote, in Latin, for all Europe, the reply to Sau- 
maise, his first " Defence of the People of England," and 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 49 

sacrificed his failing eyesight over the hibour of a second 
Defence. In all this there is to be felt under passing acci- 
dents of controversy, the labouring of English thought 
towards the settlement not reached till 1689. Just before 
the death of Cromwell, Richard Baxter added to the 
Controversy his " Holy Commonwealth," in which he 
condemned arrangements that, like Harrington's, left God 
out of account. Baxter made God head of the Common- 
wealth, and a king ruler under God and for his people. 
He upheld monarchy, though he had felt it his duty to 
make common cause with those who sought to check the 
aggressions of Charles I. 

The argument touching the best way of providing for 
the maintenance of the religious life within the nation 
was carried on now mainly by the representatives of 
three forms of opinion. Two of them agreed in the 
desire to secure unity within the church by an accord of 
opinion, determined by authority. They differed as to the 
form of the authority, but if the Presbyterian form had 
been supreme, its theory of Church Union would have 
impelled it to force, if it could, all England into conform- 
ity. This bias of opinion was in direct accord with the 
principles of monarchy. The third party was that of the 
Independents. In the time of Elizabeth there was an 
obscure sect known as the Brownists, who held a doctrine 
then supposed to urge direct encouragement of heresy 
and schism. Their argument was that in matters of 
opinion men never will agree if they are free, as they 
should be, to think for themselves. They proposed, 
therefore, that in religion all who took the Bible for their 
rule of faith should find in that fact their bond of union ; 
that each man should be free to draw his own conclusions 



50 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

as to the right way to the higher spiritual life, that he 
should then be free also to unite himself for religious 
worship into an independent congregation with those who 
agreed with him in their choice of a spiritual guide. A 
church thus formed would represent within itself all the 
diversities of human opinion. Each of its congregations 
would respect the different opinions of its neighbours, 
molesting none and by none molested, and all would be 
firmly united as one brotherhood, not by an impossible 
accord of intellectual opinion, but by. that essential spirit 
of religion to which every form of doctrine is designed to 
lead, the "charity, which is the bond of perfectness." 
As this form of opinion spread, the obscure Brownists of 
Elizabeth's time became the strong body of the Independ- 
ents in the days of Charles I. and the Commonwealth. 
Winning at first readiest acceptance from those in whom 
the bias was rather towards freedom of individual thought 
than towards authority, it included the men with whom, 
in civil affairs, the theory of a republic would find favour. 
Each of these forms of opinion had, in the days of Civil 
war and of the Commonwealth, an earnest and pure- 
minded representative. Jeremy Taylor maintained the 
ideal of the episcopal established Church ; Richard Baxter 
represented in the purest form the Presbyterian princi- 
ple ; John Milton, the Independent. Of these three men, 
however different in degree and character of intellect, the 
spiritual life was one, they were alike religious. Jeremy 
Taylor had endeavoured to bring all within the Church by 
widening its pale, and asking for no other test of Church 
fellowship than common acceptance of that oldest and 
simplest formula known as the Apostles' Creed. Milton 
desired no test of Church fellowship but an acceptance 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 51 

of the Bible as the basis of opinion, and upon that basis 
opinion wholly free. Each pleaded for charity and tol- 
eration. When Milton condemned Prelacy, he did not 
condemn those who preferred prelacy within the Church 
to which they joined themselves, but those who required 
all men, whatever their personal convictions, to accept 
prelacy as the one form of government within the Church. 
Richard Baxter, in his numerous books, again and again 
pleaded for the healing of dissension and the restoration 
of peace to the Church. What he especially observed 
was the large accord between the Presbyterians and the 
church from which they had seceded. His aim, after the 
Restoration, was to obtain from either side little conces- 
sions that would make it possible to bring back the whole 
Presbyterian body into what Iwangland had called the 
Castle of Unity. From Baxter's point of view there was 
no scheme to be found that could include the Independ- 
ents. The radical difference between Presbyterian and 
Independent had, in fact, been chief cause of the divisions 
that after Cromwell's death produced the failure of the 
Commonwealth. England, accepting the fact of the fail- 
ure, tried monarchy again, and could do so only by the 
Restoration of the Stuarts. Prince Charles had been 
taught in a stern school and might have learnt his lesson. 
The Presbyterians at the Restoration were too strong a 
body to be directly slighted. But they had not been 
tolerant in the days of their supremacy. The restored 
Church was full of men who had suffered deeply from the 
bitterness of party spirit. There was a time now for 
retaliation. All men were not Baxters and Jeremy Tay- 
lors, and among the natural passions and resentments of 
the time Baxter found it impossible to work his cure for 



52 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

Church Divisions. Still also the Roman Catholics were a 
strong body in the land, able to draw shrewd conclusions 
on their own behalf from the continued strife among 
Reformers. 

There passed, then, into the reign of Charles the Second 
all this religious energy, together with the civil contro- 
versy that seemed to be settled but had, in fact, been 
only advanced a step or two. The days of his adversity 
had taught the new king nothing except some of the 
fashions that were least worth borrowing from France. 
As far as his influence extended, in every sense, good 
music went out of fashion. He had no interest in the 
old English harmonies, in sweet accord of various instru- 
ments, fair type of the accord of various minds. He cared 
only for dance tunes to which he could snap his fingers, 
and these, he thought, were played best on the fiddle. 
The king's band, therefore, was transformed into a body 
of French fiddlers; the same music found its way into 
the revived theatres, with dancing to it, and this was 
glanced at by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in 
his burlesque play, "the Rehearsal," when spirits de- 
scended with fiddlers dressed in green, and "the green 
frogs croaked forth a coranto of France." But there 
came into England at this time a more important influ- 
ence of France over our literature. In outward forms, 
partly but not altogether for good, Italian influence went 
out and French influence came in. When many of the 
cavaliers, after the loss of their cause, formed a little Eng- 
lish colony in Paris, they became guests in the salons of 
the Hotel Rambouillet, and were in daily relation with 
the new critical spirit. The Marquise de Rambouillet 
had led a movement among the ladies who, as queens of 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 53 

society might govern its usages, for the repression of all 
kinds of evil speaking. Even the common forms of speech 
in which a lady could not distinguish herself from her 
chambermaid, were avoided as low, but there was at the 
same time an honest attempt to aid in freeing the lan- 
guage from uncertainty of conflicting dialects and shifting 
usage, so that there might be one fixed language, a stand- 
ard French, through which to express an enduring litera- 
ture. Out of this social movement the French Academy 
had arisen in 1635, the year before the birth of Boileau. 
The Academy was to produce a Dictionary that was to be 
the accredited list of words thenceforth to be adopted as 
classical French. In this process of fixing the language 
by a formal effort, preference was naturally given to words 
of Latin origin. French being a Romance language, such 
words were in harmony with its whole structure. The 
French Academy Avas at work, the ladies, called in the 
polite strain encouraged by themselves, les Precieuses, 
were still in dainty league with the grammarians and 
curious in words and phrases, when the exiled English 
courtiers came among them. At the same time the true 
vigour of French literature was rising to its highest, and 
already Corneille was producing his first and best plays. 
Critical discussion of words was passing on towards a criti- 
cism that would touch the essence of the thought within 
the words. This movement began while the Italian influ- 
ence in its decayed form still prevailed. In their own 
polite way, the Precieuses did affect literature. They 
believed that it became a person of quality to have taste 
in writing, and that Literature was a matter of high cul- 
ture with which the vulgar world had nothing to do. 
Thus taught in France, the English courtiers after the 



54 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

Restoration also affected taste. He was a man of wit and 
taste who could write verse to the tune of a saraband. A 
great noble might show taste also by discovering and aid- 
ing genius in others. There was still need of the relation 
of patron and client. In France that relation was main- 
tained in the most elaborate and dainty forms, as part of 
a great man's state. But Moliere had just then in France 
declared his power, and through him the genius of comedy 
was lavishing rare wealth of unaffected wit upon the ex- 
pression of a shrewd good sense. Moliere wrote as his 
friend Boileau would have had men write ; and Boileau, 
who was only twenty-four years old when Charles the 
Second became king of England, in that year began to 
sweep off with his satires the last traces of Italian influ- 
ence. "Let us turn," he said, "from the paste brilliants 
of Italy. All should tend to good sense." 

The critical influence of Boileau rose, and extended 
through nearly all Europe. It came to its height after 
1671, when he published his imitation of Horace's Art of 
Poetry, L'Art Poetique. France then was infested with 
small critics, and in England too a polite rhyming about 
prose and prosing about rhyme became the fashion. John 
Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, wrote in verse an " Essay on 
Poetry," and an "Essay on Satire." Lord Lansdowne 
wrote a poem on " Unnatural Flights in Poetry." The 
Earl of Roscommon, best of the group, wrote in verse an 
" Essay on Translated Yerse." Boileau himself was a true 
critic who taught at the right time the right doctrine. 
He was right when he bade those who had strayed too far 
from good sense to study the native dignity of style in the 
best poets of the Augustan time. "With an ease worthy 
of all imitation, those poets had clothed each thought in 



OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE. b^ 

simple and natural words so truly fitted that the words 
they used are for all time the happiest expression of the 
thought they uttered. Go to Nature, said Boileau, but 
see how the great artist follows Nature, and look up to 
him as your example. The small critics could understand 
only the letter of all this. In England the desire to avoid 
what was " low " in style led to a choice of words from 
the Latin side of the language, from which there was 
built up a separate book English ; so that it was accounted 
as great a mistake to write like a man, as to talk like a 
book. This fog came down from among the heights 
although it did not stay by them long, but here and there 
it lingers still among the valleys. As Boileau did not 
begin to write his satires until 1660, it was not until six 
or seven years after the Restoration that his influence was 
generally felt in England. 

Because the French critics knew nothing about English 
Literature, their followers shared their ignorance, and for 
two or three generations the Commonwealth period seemed 
to have fallen as a cloud between the present and the past. 

We were on the way to that state of critical conceit 
which young Addison reflected when he wrote at College, 
in the manner of his time, a sketch of the great English 
poets from Chaucer to Dryden. He showed his ignorance 
of Chaucer by adopting the opinion of the day, 

In vain he jests m his unpohshed strain, 
And tries to make his readers laugh, in vain ; 

and sank deeper still when he followed his blind guides 
by looking on the age of Elizabeth as a " barbarous age," 

Old Spenser next, warmed with poetic rage, 
In antick tales amused a barbarous age. 



5Q A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

But now the mystic tale that pleased of yore, 
Can charm an understandmg age no more. 

Shakespeare, young Addison left out altogether. Although 
the French critics understood Milton no better than 
Shakespeare, Addison fastened upon him from the first, 
and since the nightingale was nothing to the cuckoos, was 
content to say of him " he seems above the critic's nicer 
law." 

Free to return to verse after long labour for the direct 
service of his country, Milton had finished writing " Para- 
dise Lost " in the year of the plague of London, 1665, 
and he published it in 1667, the year after the Fire by 
which great part of the city was destroyed. At some 
time in the latter years of the Commonwealth his mind 
passed from its first conception, which was of an Epic 
with king Arthur for its hero, to the theme he finally 
adopted. The land was full of controversies touching the 
form of religion. Among the Commonwealth men there 
was a constant bandying of technical terms in theology, 
speculation over dogmas founded on the fall of man. 
Milton had little liking for this kind of argument, he 
made it in Paradise Lost one of the entertainments of the 
devils, who were to amuse themselves as they pleased until 
Satan's return, that they 

reasoned high 
Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, 
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, 
And found no end in wandering mazes lost. 

The starting point of scepticism in that day was from 
a dogmatic theology that seemed to argue God unjust. 
When Milton took for his theme the Fall of Man, he saw 



OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE. 57 

that he could shape out of it a poem fulfilling in the 
highest degree all requirements of the Epic, while it 
would set to music the religion of his country, as he felt it, 
and "justify the ways of God to man." The action was 
one ; it was great in the persons concerned, the First Par- 
ents of the race; great in itself; and, according to the 
religious faith of his countrymen, supremely great in its 
consequences. He was supplied also with that supernat- 
ural machinery which Avas held to be essential to an epic 
poem. Ancient traditions of angels and archangels en- 
abled him to shape the contending powers of Good and 
Evil into spiritual forms entirely suited to his theme, and 
wanting in no element of dignity or grandeur. In Vergil's 
-^neid the one theme is the settlement of ^neas among 
the Latins, great in its consequence, because it laid the first 
foundations of the Eoman Emj)ire. What happened before 
the action of the poem, and what was to come of it, Ver- 
gil included in two episodes. iEneas renewing his old 
griefs in narrative to Dido tells all that preceded ; descend- 
ing afterwards to the underworld, he learns from the shade 
of Anchises what shall follow. Milton, in like manner, 
has for his one theme the Temptation and Fall, with its 
immediate consequence, the expulsion from Paradise. 
What came before, is told in the discourse of Raphael 
with Adam ; what should follow, is learnt from the Vision 
shown by Michael, and the discourse of Michael before 
Adam and Eve quit Eden. That episode shows the sub- 
ject of the poem great in its consequence, not through 
man's ruin, but through his redemption. While Milton, 
with aid of the highest intellectual culture, enshrined in 
Charles the Second's reign the religion of his country in 
epic that rose high " above the Aonian Mount ; " Bunyan 



58 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

in liis way, unlearned in any but one book, shaped his 
religion into homely allegory of the Christian's flight from 
destruction, and of his aids and perils as a Pilgrim who 
sought everlasting life. 

In 1671, three years before his death, Milton published 
in one volume " Paradise Regained " and " Samson Agon- 
istes." Paradise Regained was a miniature epic, in some 
sense a companion to Paradise Lost, since the theme of 
one poem was a Temptation and a Fall, the theme of the 
other a Temptation and a Victory. The epic form in 
" Paradise Regained " was deliberately subdued into har- 
mony with one unbroken strain, of which the burden may 
be said to be, " Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for 
him." Paradise is to be Regained by every man who 
bears the temptations of life, whatever their form, in the 
patient spirit of Christ, who waits his Father's time and 
seeks only to do his Father's will. The temptation to dis- 
trust and impatience was great in those days for men who 
like Milton had battled for what they held to be the cause 
of civil and religious freedom, and who saw, in the politi- 
cal and social life of England under Charles the Second, 
exultation of the Philistines over the fallen cause of God. 
For this reason Milton again shaped his song to the times, 
and when all seemed dark about him, when there was no 
man who could tell from what quarter deliverance would 
come, he published his last poems. Li "Paradise Re- 
gained " he dwelt upon the patience of Christ, meek and 
untroubled in his firm rest upon God. In the midst of 
" Samson Agonistes," he set in a fine chorus questioning 
from the condition of the country, questioning from the 
sorrows of the individual man ; but he set it there that it 
might have its answer in the close. 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 59 

God of our fathers ! what is man 

That thou towards him with hand so various, 

Or might I say contrarious, 

Temper'st thy providence through his short course ? 

The foremost of those who seemed chosen by God to 
advance his glory and effect the people's safety — the 
Cromwells, Hampdens, Pyms, over the ruin of whose 
work many despaired in 1671, — even toward these, thus 
dignified, 

Thou oft 

Amidst their height of noon, 

Changest thy countenance, and thy hand, with no regard 

Of highest favours past 

From thee on them, or them to thee of service. 

Nor only dost degrade them, or remit 

To life obscured, which were a fair dismission. 

But throw'st them lower than thou didst exalt them high, 

Unseemly falls in human eye. 

Too grievous for the trespass or omission ; 

Oft leav'st them to the hostile sword 

Of heathen or profane, their carcases 

To dogs and fowls a prey, or else captived ; 

Or to the unjust tribunals, under change of times, 

And condemnation of the ingrateful multitude. 

But Milton's poem, and his life as a poet, closed in the 
midst of outward darkness with expression of the quiet 

faith that 

All is best, though we oft doubt 
AVhat the unsearchable dispose 
Of highest Wisdom brings about, 
And ever best found in the close. 

In this case the event showed clearly enough that Mil- 
ton's faith was well founded. The very circumstances 



60 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

that were taken as grounds of despair were those which 
secured good speed to the settlement desired. The Eng- 
lish Revolution followed within eighteen years of the poems 
in which Milton sought to suggest that it is one part of 
a true faith in God not to despair of the Republic. 

Taking a scripture parallel, for the more ready persua- 
sion of the people, Dryden shaped in his "Absalom and 
Achitophel " keen satire in verse as a political pamphlet 
on the vital question of the day. Faction he suggested 
had been heated by outcry over the feigned Popish Plot, 
Shaftesbury (Achitophel) had taken advantage of this to 
stir Protestant passion and persuade Monmouth (Absa- 
lom) to rebellion against his father. Who were the heads 
of the rebellion ? What friends had the king ? Here 
opportunity is given for vignette sketches of leaders on 
either side. Among various counsels comes that of the 
king. His enemies had abused his clemency, but let them 
now 

" Beware the fury of a patient man. 
Law they require : let Law then show her face." 

Dryden's poem was published on the 17th of November 
1681 ; on the 24th Law showed her face in a way not de- 
sired by the king, for the grand jury ignored the bill of 
indictment against Shaftesbury and he was saved. But 
he left the country in 1682, to die in the following year in 
the course of nature. His friend John Locke at the same 
time left England, which was then no very safe home 
for an active friend of liberty. Both went to Holland. 
Charles the Second died on the 6th of February 1685. 
His brother, the Duke of York, succeeded as James the 
Second, and began his reign by going openly to mass. Li 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 61 

November of the same year Louis XIV. in France revoked 
the Edict of Nantes, which had secured, in some pLaces, 
to a limited extent, freedom of worship for the Protes- 
tants. Although required to become Roman Catholics and 
forbidden to quit the country, many French Protestants 
went into exile. Not a few settled in England, where 
their descendants add to the strength of the English peo- 
ple. John Evelyn noted in his diary how the Bishop of 
Valence said that the victory over heresy in the Revoca- 
tion of the Edict of Nantes was " but what was wished in 
England; and that God seemed to raise the French king 
to this power and magnanimous action, that he might be 
in a capacity to assist in doing the same here." King 
James claimed a right to override law by dispensing with 
the Test Act, and in April 1687 issued a Declaration of 
Liberty of Conscience in England, suspending all reli- 
gious oaths and tests. This set dissenters free as well as 
Roman Catholics. The first appearance in Literature of 
Daniel Defoe was as the writer of three pamphlets to 
warn the Dissenters, he being himself one, that when they 
sent addresses of thanks to the king for his repeal of penal 
laws, they thanked him for assuming to himself a right to 
override the law. Again was urged the limit of royal 
authority. In the same year 1687 Dry den, who had 
become Roman Catholic, aided the king's purpose of 
bringing about, if possible, a Roman Catholic reaction, 
by writing an argument in verse between the milk white 
Hind, type of Catholicism, and the Panther whose spots 
indicated the multitude of Protestant heresies and schisms. 
His object in speaking through beasts, a device open 
enough to ridicule, was to withdraw the argument as 
much as possible from its daily association with passionate 



62 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

strife of men, and so to get quieter hearing. A very lively 
caricature, by Matthew Prior and Charles Montague, in 
the manner of the Duke of Buckingham's Rehearsal, 
called " the Hind and Panther transversed to the Story 
of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse," cleverly 
seized what in art was the weak point of Dryden's poem, 
though for the end it had in view the fault gave strength. 
Five years and a half before, when Dryden, believing him- 
self to be a Protestant, wrote the " Religio Laici," his poem 
showed that he was Roman Catholic already. The theory 
of a Pope, whose absolute opinion shall determine contro- 
versies and secure Unity of the faith as a bond of peace, 
is in the doctrine of the Religio Laici that 

— after hearing what the Church can say, 
If still our Reason runs another way 
That private Reason 'tis more just to curb 
Than by disputes the public peace disturb. 
For points obscure are of small use to learn : 
But common quiet is mankind's concern. 

In April 1688 James II. issued again his Declaration 
of Indulgence, and in May he ordered it to be read in 
all Churches. The Archbishop of Canterbury and six 
bishops, one of them Thomas Ken, the author of an Even- 
ing Hymn still in wide use throughout England, sent to 
the King a petition which pointed out that the Declaration 
was " founded upon such a dispensing power as hath been 
often declared illegal in Parliament." The Petition was 
hawked about London, where the Declaration was read 
only in four churches. The bishops were tried for libel 
and acquitted. The King had a camp at Hounslow for 
the maintenance of his authority, but the soldiers in camp 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 63 

joined the shouts of the people at the acquittal of the 
seven bishops. On the day of the acquittal, June 30th 
1688, a messenger was sent to invite William of Orange, 
whose fleet entered Torbay on the anniversary of Gun- 
powder Plot. On the 19th of December the Prince of 
Orange held a Court at St. James's. James the Second 
took shelter with the King of France, and w\as declared 
to have abdicated. In February 1689 William and Mary 
became King and Queen of England, accepting with the 
crown those definite limitations of authority which were 
afterwards embodied in the Bill of Rights. 

If the friends of an absolute authority were defeated, 
their opinions were not changed. Dryden gave up his 
office of Poet Laureate by refusing to take the required 
oaths upon its renewal under a new sovereign. King 
William was loyal to the principles of the English Revo- 
lution, but he drew England into his continental wars ; 
and England entered into them the more willingly because 
they struck at Louis XIV. Thousands of Englishmen 
who would have found it hard to understand the technical 
grounds of foreign war under William. III. and Anne, 
w^re content to strike at the power of the King of France, 
because his strength might be against the liberties of Eng- 
land. Even at home there was need of watchfulness. 
John Locke returned to England in the ship that brought 
Queen Mary, and together with the Revolution came 
at once a fit interpretation of its meaning. In 1689 and 
1690 Locke produced "a Letter concerning Toleration 
in Religion," and maintained his positions against attack ; 
he also published " Two Treatises of Government," in 
one of which he demolished Filmer's theory of the divine 
origin of absolute authority, and in the other he set up 



64 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

the true theory of Civil Government. He published also 
in 1690 his "Essay concerning Human Understanding," 
of which the purpose was to persuade men of the limits 
of the knowable and win them from the waste of strength 
upon vain argument over questions which no man could 
determine. Locke was one of the men of science to 
whose energies new force had been given since the days 
of Francis Bacon. The continued energy is indicated by 
the fact that 1687, the year of James the Second's Dec- 
laration of Indulgence, was the year in which Isaac 
Newton published his " Principia," which included the 
demonstration of his theory of gravitation. Locke had 
been associated with the group of scientific men at Ox- 
ford, and out of inclination towards useful science, had 
made physic his profession. But the times bred thought 
as to the constitution of a state. Lord Shaftesbury, when 
Lord Ashley, had been drawn towards Locke by the wis- 
dom of his political reasonings, and had assisted in deter- 
mining the bent of his scientific study towards the 
constitution of society. Then Locke's writings were of 
Civil and Religious Liberty, of Education, including care 
of health, of the conservation of intellectual energy, so 
that it might be spent only upon useful discussion, and 
upon the maintenance of Christianity by taking it directly 
from its source, without reference to the vain efforts of 
later disputants to define what lies beyond the bounds 
of human knowledge. Locke, who was deeply religious, 
taught that man's senses are the gates by which all human 
knowledge enters, and that we cannot form a conception 
of any thing that lies wholly outside the range of our 
experience. Matters of faith, he said, are above reason, 
not opposed to reason ; we can have no higher assurance 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. Q^ 

of tnitli than the Word of God. Having, therefore, con- 
vinced ourselves by reason of the authority of the book 
from which we draw our religion, we take simply its teach- 
ing upon spiritual things, and rest upon that, as sufficient. 
"We pass the bounds of human understanding when we 
cumber revealed truth with definitions of our own. 

At the beginning of William the Third's reign Locke's 
argument for Toleration in Religion which time and ex- 
perience have now taught almost all Englishmen to take 
as matter of course, was distinctly opposed, on the old 
ground that it destroyed Unity of the Church and opened 
the door to heresy and schism. The truth was not yet 
learned that uniformity of opinion is unattainable, and 
that the Church of a free people cannot comjprehend the 
nation unless it allow room for wide varieties in critical 
opinion. If we can be content with bringing all mto one 
brotherhood by maintenance of the one spirit of religion, 
we may not only bind a nation, but bind also the nations 
into one. 

James the Second had persecuted the Scotch Covenant- 
ers, keen Puritans bitterly hostile to Catholicism. Oppo- 
nents of the King's claims to authority were paired with 
the Scotch Covenanters, who fed on whig, sour whey, and 
so they were dubbed Whigs. The Irish were Koman 
Catholics, and among the Irish there were notorious 
thieves called tories ; Tories therefore, became the return 
nickname for the King's friends as supporters of a Roman 
Catholic reaction and the King's exemption from control 
of law. In those days a man was Whig or Tory as he 
had good or ill will to the settlement made by the English 
Revolution. The stumble of his horse that caused William 
the Third's death was ascribed to a mole's breaking of the 



66 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

soil. The mole was afterwards toasted by those who 
desired a second restoration of the Stuarts. Thus Sir 
Walter Scott made in his " Waverley " the Laird of Bal- 
mawhipple call for a bumper " to the little gentleman in 
black who did such service in 1702, and may the White 
Horse " (of the House of Hanover) " break his neck over 
a mound of his making." 



OF ENGLISH LlTEBATUllE. 67 



CHAPTER III. 

FROM THE REIGN OF ANNE TO THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 

Queen Anne came to the English throne in INIarch 
1702 at the age of thirty-seven, a well meaning woman, 
kindly, religions, and with a mind someAvhat enfeebled by 
domestic grief. On the 29th of July 1700 she had lost, 
in the Duke of Gloucester, the only child surviving of 
seventeen that had been born. She had then a close 
friendship with Marlborough's wife, calling herself in their 
correspondence Mrs. Morley, and Lady Marlborough Mrs. 
Freeman. After the death of her last child her signature 
changed from " Your faithful Morley " to " Your poor 
unfortunate faithful Morley." Devoted to the English 
Church and its ecclesiastical system, Anne would not take 
the sacrament before the clergy, and those first fruits and 
tenths which had of old time been yielded to the Pope 
and which were added by Henry VIIT. to the Crown 
revenue, Queen Anne, on the 6th of February, 1704, 
which was her birthday and also a Sunday, gave as a 
birthda}^ offering to the poorer clergy of the Church. 
The fund is still so applied, under the name of Queen 
Anne's Bounty. It may be taken as another indication 
of the character of Queen Anne, that she gave out of her 
first year's civil list a hundred thousand pounds to relieve 
burdens of the people. 

About six months before the death of William III., 



68 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

Anne's father, James II., liaci died in France, and Louis 
XIV. defied William by acknowledging the son of James 
II. King of England. This act sounded again a note of 
war, and Anne's first speech in Parliament maintained 
war. It also repeated a recommendation of Union be- 
tween England and Scotland ; which after much difficult 
negotiation was finally arranged in July 1706, to date 
from the 1st of May 1707, Great Britain being chosen as 
the name for the United country. 

Queen Anne had no ill will to her own family ; the bias 
of her mind was towards authority, and through her devo- 
tion to the established Church she could perhaps be made 
an instrument in the hands of those who were unfriendly 
to the settlement made by the Revolution. But the ways 
of politicians on both sides had in those days become very 
crooked. What little there was of a highminded states- 
manship was often lost among lowthoughted cares of a 
political life in which few men kept to a straight path, 
subordinating passion and ambition to the public good. 
The great currents of opinion were still flowing in accord- 
ance with a fixed natural law, but they struck on mud- 
banks with which the whole stream was becoming choked, 
and were thus for a time deflected and defiled. 

The first zeal of the Tories was for a renewal of strong 
war against dissent. This was in right accordance with 
the belief still prevalent that the desired Unity of the 
Church was to be secured by a common agreement upon 
points of discipline and doctrine. To this form of zeal, 
Defoe opposed in 1702 an ironical reduction to absurdity 
of the policy of persecution, called " the Shortest Way 
with the Dissenters." He was condemned to imprison- 
ment and set in the pillory on each of the last three days 



OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE. 69 

of Juty 1703. " A Hymn to the Pillory," which he wrote 
for distribution to the crowd, caught easily the ears and 
understandings of the people. The flowergirls w^ere about, 
and Defoe's pillory was strewn with roses. Defoe's pillory 
is a new starting point for English Literature. With De- 
foe especially it may be said that we have the beginning 
of a form of literature written with the desire to reach all 
readers. The French critical influence with its purblind 
classicism, its servitude to forms, its false image of dignity 
and its low dread of the simplicity which it accounted 
'^low," was still cherished with much solemn regard. 
From that which called itself polite society the old large 
and healthy life seemed to be gone. Not out of the for- 
malism of French critics, but out of the national life came 
health. Defoe went from his pillory to prison where his 
durance was not very strict, and began to issue on the 
19th of February 1704 his journal known as the " Re- 
view," which came out twice a week until 1705, and then 
three times a week till 1713, when Anne's reign was 
drawing to a close. It was the first journal in England 
that gave thoughtful comment upon public affairs. In 
this paper Defoe kept guard upon the constitution, and a 
supplement to it, in which he dealt by slight machinery of 
a club with questions of minor morals, must have sug- 
gested to Richard Steele his '-'- Tatler." 

Jonathan Swift published in 1704 his " Battle of the 
Books," based on a small controversy born of a small 
reaction against dead worship of the dead, with not much 
life in the argument on either side. It includes the pleas- 
ant dialogue between the spider and the bee, in which the 
spider is the modern, and the bee the ancient, who seeks 
only what is beautiful in nature to draw from it, as the 



70 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

bee seeks honey and wax, "the two noblest of things, 
which are sweetness and light." "A Tale of a Tub," 
published by Swift in the same volume, was, in the inter- 
est of Christian charity, a witty satire on the controversies 
that caused Roman Catholic, English churchman and Dis- 
senter, Peter, Martin and Jack, to damage and soil the 
coats, — clothing of righteousness, — their Father gave 
them. It was a plea for common fellowship and good 
will, in which Martin fared better than Peter and Jack, 
while each might think himself ill treated. Addison de- 
lighted in Swift's wit, but Queen Anne thought that the 
book ought not to have been written by a clergyman. 
Swift's genius was more robust than Addison's. John 
Forster in his fragment of Swift's life has given the lines 
of "Baucis and Philemon" as Swift originally wrote them. 
Addison persuaded Swift to much alteration. We may 
now compare the first draft with the revision, and see 
very distinctly where there was strength lost by Swift's 
acceptance of wrong principles of criticism then in fashion. 
While Swift was in London, he amused the town, at the 
beginning of the year 1708, with an attempt to bring into 
disrepute the astrological almanacs that fostered super- 
stition. Under the name of Isaac Bickerstaff, who pro- 
fessed himself to be indeed an astrologer, he predicted the 
day of the death of one of the chief makers of these 
almanacs, John Partridge. When the day was passed. 
Partridge's death was described in another pamphlet. 

Richard Steele began his " Tatler " in 1709, when this 
joke was still fresh, and Isaac Bickerstaff the astrologer 
thus came to be a central figure in that series of essays. 
The success of "the Tatler," which was wholly designed 
by Steele, established the periodical essay as a force in 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 71 

literature. " The Tatler " was a penny paper that ap- 
peared three times a week. When its success was already 
assui'ed, Addison contributed, and when 271 numbers had 
been published, Steele dropped " the Tatler " to revive it 
a few weeks later, under a new name, " the Sj)ectator," as 
a daily essay. He was still the sole proprietor and editor, 
but his friend Addison helped actively. By the founding 
of these papers Steele gave Addison to English Litera- 
ture. The design of Steele in Tatler and Spectator, 
which he brought his friend Addison to share, was by 
issue of short unassuming essays, untouched by the bit- 
terness of political controversy, to assist in restoring to 
English society the wholesome tone lost in the days of 
Charles the Second. The fashion of speech that degraded 
womanhood, and affected ridicule of marriage Steele 
battled against with his kindly wit. One of the most 
pathetic of the sketches in " the Tatler " was a picture of 
a happy home, and of the void made by the loss of wife 
and mother. The weak vanities that had been fostered 
in women by a low form of worship, Steele and Addison 
touched with the kindliest of satire. The foppish affec- 
tation of profanity and other stains upon the manners 
of the day, were not overlooked, and in Steele's writing- 
there was an earnest effort to break down the conven- 
tional opinion that supported duelling. When the political 
movements of Queen Anne's reign led at last to question 
whether the party of reaction might not succeed in its 
schemes for a reversal of the settlement of the succession 
after the Queen's death, Steele would no longer bind him- 
self to shut out political discussion from his papers. He 
brought "the Spectator" to an end, established in its 
place "the Guardian," went on to "the Englishman" and 



72 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

by a pamphlet on " the Crisis " exposed himself to the 
wrath of a Tory House of Commons. But there really 
was at that time a danger to the country, clear enough to 
all who read in any detail the records of Anne's reign. 
The queen's unexpected death by apoplexy on the 1st of 
August 1714 deprived plotters of time for the maturing of 
their plans. Steele's pamphlet against attempts to under- 
mine the Constitution, for which he was expelled from a 
Tory House of Commons, was submitted to the criticism 
of Addison and others before publication. It had for its 
sole object to save Englishmen from danger of ignorance 
upon a vital question, by setting forth, with exact citation 
of documents, what was meant by the English Constitu- 
tion and what was the settlement, and the purpose of the 
settlement of the succession to the Crown. When Addi- 
son wrote of Steele's plain speaking in those critical 
times "I am in a thousand troubles for poor Dick, and 
wish his zeal for the public may not be ruinous to him- 
self," he spoke with his own natural timidity, and indi- 
cated a relation between public and private interests that 
Steele never could have recognized. Wherever Steele 
and Addison were fellow-workers, Steele, whose whole 
heart was his friend's, gave to his friend alone the praise. 
But of the two characters Steele's was the more vigorous, 
and Addison climbed highest when he followed where 
Steele led. 

Addison's sensitive nature gave refinement to his humour, 
and delicacy to his sense of the charm of style. He was 
the best critic of his day, and the more readily accepted 
because he shared to some extent, conventional opinions 
of his time. He enjoyed "Chevy Chase " and "the Babes 
in the Wood," and did so for good human reasons. But 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 73 

when he tried in Spectator papers to show cause for his 
enjoyment, it was by suggesting resemblances to Horace 
and VergiL There are passages in Addison's criticisms 
of " Paradise Lost " by which he made Spectator papers 
a means of rescuing Milton from the prejudices of the 
day, in which the prejudices themselves govern his argu- 
ment; and what we might now look upon as the weak 
part of his criticism, was in his own time a safeguard to 
his reputation. But there was nothing conventional in 
Addison's tastes. The sympathetic insight of genius and 
the religious depths of character caused him to fasten only 
on that which was good; all that could be affected by 
convention was his manner of accounting critically for his 
right impressions. His judgment could be warped also by 
kindly feeling when the work of a friend like Ambrose 
Philips was in question. 

Alexander Pope was twenty-three years old in 1711 
when the Spectator was appearing. In that year he pub- 
lished his poem called "An Essay on Criticism," written 
two years earlier. It followed the fashion of critical 
France in writing about writing, or rather, since its theme 
was criticism, in writing about writing about writing. But 
though of the school of Boileau, and written, of course, 
in couplets after the French style of versification which 
was already overrunning English Literature, Pope's " Es- 
say on Criticism" had an English ring. It was good- 
natured, too, and taught the censorious that 

Good nature and good sense must ever join ; 
To err is human, to forgive divine. 

In the "Rape of the Lock" Pope, at the close of Queen 
Anne's reign, amused society with a mock heroic that 



74 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

again was in the school of Boileau, for it might never 
have been written had not Boileau written " Le Lutrin." 
But in the charm of style Pope here excelled his master. 
Though a few touches of English earnestness are in the 
treatment of a frivolous theme, as in the furnishing of 
Belinda's toilet table with "Puffs, powders, patches, 
Bibles, billets doux," there is nothing to cloud the play- 
fulness of satire upon a fashionable world exceeding busy 
about nothing. 

But there was now rising in Europe another mood than 
that of light trifling with triflers. Society in England 
was little helped by the personal influence of the two 
first Kings of the House of Hanover who, after Queen 
Anne's death, duly assured the Protestant succession to 
the English throne. In France the social corruption and 
the miseries of the people had kept pace together. The 
resources of an absolute dominion had been strained 
cruelly to pay for triumphs and calamities of war. The 
people, as Voltaire said, were dying to the sound of Te 
Deums. The death of Louis XIV. followed not long after 
that of Queen Anne. In 1715 Louis XV. came to the 
French throne as a child, and from 1715 to 1726 there was 
the Regency of the Duke of Orleans. It is hard to say 
whether the profligacy and meanness of French fashionable 
life was at its worst under the Regency or during the 
personal reign of the King, which lasted until 1774 and 
developed, among those who dreamed of better things, a 
deep contempt for the corruptions of what they supposed 
to be an overcivilized society. There was an excess of 
formal outward polish to supply the place of frank sin- 
cerity, and there was the self-satisfaction of men who had 
no conception of the use of life. Pierre Bayle, who had 



OF ENGLISH LITERATUBE. 75 

keen reason to know the baseness of the dragonnades in 
favour of religion, confounded religion itself with the 
degradation of it into miserable forms, and looking out 
upon the evils of society, asked whether a just God could 
have created such a world as he then saw. In 1695-6 he 
published in Holland his " Dictionnaire Historique," in 
which lives of men were told by an acute and honest 
scholar with continual suggestion of doubt whether the 
actual state of Man, and even the course of Nature, did 
not make faith in the existence of a God impossible. This 
work, which was translated into English in 1711, and for 
its abundance of curious and suggestive matter was a 
favourite with the religious Addison, may be conveniently 
taken as a starting point for the form of scepticism devel- 
oped throughout Europe, but especially in France, during 
the eighteenth century. It was not now as in Milton's 
time, a question of the justice or injustice involved in 
certain theological doctrines, as of election or predestina- 
tion, but it struck deeper, and looking out upon the world 
asked boldly, Can this be a world that a just God is gov- 
erning? Bayle died in 1706, and in 1710 the philosopher 
Leibnitz, writing in Paris, published in French his " The- 
odicee," which attempted answer to Bayle's questioning. 
He began with the suggestion that Bayle is now in heaven ; 
escaped from this world in which he could see only a part 
of the divine scheme, and that imperfectly, he is where he 
may, j^erhaps, look out upon the whole and doubt no more. 
This pointed to the main argument of Leibnitz, that our 
limited view makes us imperfect judges of the ways of God. 
We cannot know what is man's place in the Universe, nor 
on this earth can we see more than a small part of the 
whole scheme of creation. In what we can see, Leibnitz 



76 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

argued, we can find justice and wisdom, doubts begin 
where our light fails. But the patent shams and unreali- 
ties of that which called itself the polite life of the time — 
though to us they are now, both in France and England, 
most easily traceable to their causes — disheartened many 
earnest men, especially the young. In 1706 Bernard 
Mandeville published in England a little fable in five hun- 
dred lines of verse entitled " The Grumbling Hive, or the 
Knaves turned Honest." Bees in a hive, he said, are like 
men in society, they have trades and professions as men 
have, and in a certain hive every bee became so painfully 
conscious of the knavery of all his neighbours, that they 
resolved to become honest. When they did so, there was 
no more need for lawyers, because there was no injustice 
to guard against ; no need for doctors, because there was 
an end of ways of life and ways of eating that produced 
disease ; no need of merchants, because there was no de- 
mand for foreign luxuries. Trades based upon waste and 
folly disappeared, and thus with honesty came poverty. 
The standing army was put down, because the honest 
hive was capable of no aggressive war. It was attacked, 
as defenceless, by the bees of other hives. Every bee then 
served as a volunteer. The enemies Avere driven back, 
but honesty had found its way at last to such simplicity 
of life that the hive itself was judged to be unnecessary. 
The whole swarm, therefore, flew back to its original home 
in a hollow tree. When we consider that the course of 
reaction against evils of an artificial life was on its way 
to an emphatic maintenance of the innocence of the state 
of nature, the place of Bernard Mandeville's satire in the 
main current of European thought, already flowing to- 
wards a new Revolution, becomes very distinct. First an- 



OF ENGLISH LITERATUBE. 77 

notated in 1714, in 1723 "the Fable of the Bees" was 
reproduced, with a full prose commentary, in two volumes, 
enforcing the idea that civilization is based on the vices 
of mankind. 

Three years later, in November 1726, appeared Swift's 
" Gulliver's Travels," a book by no means to be isolated 
from the rest of Literature as representing Swift's personal 
and peculiar scorn of the meanness and corruption of hu- 
man society. The voice of its time is in this book also, 
but had a more intense expression through the genius and 
the character of Swift. To bring home to men the little- 
ness of the lives about which they were meanly occupied. 
Swift used his vivid imagination in the shaping of a book 
of travels full of wonders as a fairy tale, but addressed by 
him to men rather than children. With Lemuel Gulliver 
among the Lilliputians, we see civilization in a baby show. 
Only change the size of men, and let an inch stand for a 
foot, and how trivial we seem in our own eyes. Reverse 
the glass, and imagine men and all that belongs to them, 
and all their little pets and fumes, as they would be looked 
down upon by a race, say, twelve times taller, to do that 
we visit Brobdignag. If a few feet of size make so much 
difference in our power of discovering the smallness of 
that which we are apt to look upon as the chief work 
of life, how must our petty jealousies and ambitions, our 
glorying in stars and garters, seem to the angels who can 
look down from the height of heaven ? In the voyage to 
Laputa we have satire on man's pride in his own knowl- 
edge, and in the voyage to the Houyhnhnms, where the 
innocent life of one of the lower animals is compared with 
the corrupt life of man calling himself civilized, the satire 
fiercely expresses what was then the growing sense of evil 



78 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

in society. Rousseau was arguing a few years later that 
man is the worse for civilization ; that the natural man, 
the noble savage, having no property and therefore no 
inducement to theft, and being in other ways without 
temptation to crime, lived a purer and a better life than 
the man warped by civilization. Swift made a like con- 
trast when he placed man's artificial and dishonest life 
below the life of a horse. 

Two or three years after the appearance of Gulliver's 
Travels, one of the kindliest of poets, John Gay, wrote a 
•satire on society less forcible but quite as fierce. His 
"Beggar's Opera," produced with very great success in 
January 1728, was full of under-suggestion that the ways 
of the great politicians were one with the ways of thieves. 
A paper in " the Craftsman " at once boldly applied it all 
to actual life, and the refusal of permission to act the 
sequel, entitled " Polly," told how the official world had 
understood its satire. " Polly " was printed ; and if in the 
Beggar's Opera one might enjoy the art without attending 
to the social satire, in " Polly " the satire is forced strongly 
on attention. Its whole plan is to place a picture of de- 
graded civilization between pirates and savages, and show 
society upon a level with the pirates, or below them, and 
the natural man, the savage, far exalted above both. 

In the days of " Gulliver's Travels " and " the Beggar's 
Opera," and of Pope's attack on the small end of Litera- 
ture in his "Dunciad," appeared in English poetry the 
first clear signs of a reviving sense of Nature. Within a 
few months of one another appeared Dyer's " Grongar 
Hill," Allan Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd," and "Winter," 
the first published part of Thomson's "Seasons." "Gron- 
gar Hill " was a simple utterance of the sense of natural 



OF ENGLISH LITERATUBE. 79 

beauty during a walk up the low hill by the Towy at 
whose foot stands the house in which Dyer was born. 
The poet blends, as he should blend, human feeling with 
his poem so as to mark harmony between the world 
within man and the world without. He even escapes 
from the all pervading couplets of tensyllabled lines, to 
the old octosyllabic measure. Allan Ramsay, who began 
life as a poor lad working on the banks of a lead mine, had 
a true songnote of his own, and the lyric parts are very 
pleasant in his pastoral play. In Thomson's " Seasons," 
the diction is Latin, rhetorical ; but no work of that day 
approached " the Seasons " in the fulness and variety of 
its expression of Nature in all her moods. If Thomson 
delights in sending his nouns abroad each with three 
Latin adjectives in attendance, the Latin adjectives give 
more than eye service ; each helps to the exact expression 
of a thought. Through the whole poem there runs also a 
main thought summed up in the closing Hymn 

" These as they change, Almighty Father, these 
Are but the varied God." 

The whole work is shaped into a poet's answer to those 
who held that Nature denied God. Thomson's "Hymn 
of the Seasons " was written in 1728. In 1732 Pope pub- 
lished the first part of his "Essay on Man," containing 
the first two epistles, the third epistle followed in 1733, 
the fourth in 1734, and in 1738 he summed up that work 
with his " Universal Prayer." Pope wrote in Queen 
Anne's reign the " Essay on Criticism " and " Rape of the 
Lock." In the reign of George I. he made money by fol- 
lowing the classical fashion with a translation of Homer. 
In the reign of George 11. years were ripening his own 



80 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

sense of life, and the reaction against frivolity and formal- 
ism had carried the course of Literature beyond the shal- 
lows. There was a waste of marsh on either side, but the 
main stream rolled through it now as a deep river under 
leaden skies. Pope's writing in this part of his life deals 
with the larger problem of society. His " Essay on Man " 
was a distinct effort to meet in his own way the doubts 
that had been spreading since the time of Bayle. His 
argument was that of Leibnitz's Theodicee, a book he had 
not read. It had entered into daily reasonings of men, and 
Pope may very well have owed his argument to Leibnitz 
without having taken it directly from him. Li his reason- 
ing for evidence of divine wisdom even in the passions 
and the selfishness of man, he framed a little scheme oi 
his own. His Epistles and Satires he regarded as so many 
expressions of his argument reduced from theory to prac- 
tice. Two years after Pope had published his fourth 
Epistle and two years before he printed his Universal 
Prayer, Joseph Butler, in 1736, furnished his very different 
contribution to the same argument, in a book studied to 
this day at the English Universities, arguing the "Analogy 
of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and 
Course of Nature." Two years after its publication Butler 
was made a bishop. 

In those days John Wesley at Oxford, aided by his 
brother Charles, was preparing to strike a more effectual 
blow against doubts based upon the insincerities of man. 
When Swift published " Gulliver's Travels " John Wesley, 
twenty-three years old, obtained his Fellowship at Lincoln 
College Oxford. His reaction against formalism in reli- 
gion was in the direction of sincerity. He and his brother 
persuaded some of their fellow students to join them in 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 81 

living before the world, fearless of its conventions, as well 
as they could, the Christian life as Christ had taught it. 
They were a society at first of fifteen students laughed at 
as "the Godly Club," "the Bible moths," and by a name 
that stuck to them, as " Methodists." They visited tlie 
sick and the prisoners, and strove to " recover the image 
of God." George Whitefield, who went as a poor servitor 
to Pembroke College, was admitted of their number. 
Wesley's growing influence upon men from that time 
forth bore witness to the power of a deep sincerity. He 
died at the age of eighty-eight, after sixty-five years of 
ministration. For more than fifty years he preached two, 
three or four sermons a day, and travelled about four 
thousand five hundred miles in each year, carrying his 
enthusiasm from place to place. What he asked of his 
hearers was that they would awake and arise, put aside all 
idle formalism, and join themselves to his society, not by 
pledging themselves to particular doctrinal opinions, but 
by a resolve as far as possible to live really the Christian 
life, and avoid every custom of the world that was in 
conflict with it. George Whitefield, who began his work 
under the influence of Wesley, spread similar teaching, 
with a little more regard to doctrine, preaching commonly, 
like Wesley, in the open air, to audiences that might be 
reckoned by tens of thousands. When John Wesley died, 
he left an organized religious society of 140,000 members, 
in Britain and America. True it is that " the effectual 
fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." This 
great effort to restore sincerity to the religion of the coun- 
try, — which no fault of Wesley's has placed outside the 
established Church of England — had its rise in one of the 
great centres of English thought, the University of Oxford. 



82 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

While the battle for a freer because truer life was thus 
being fought in England, evidence was everywhere of the 
sickness of mind due to an unwholesome condition of 
society. As the body sickens in confinement, so may the 
mind. There is more evidence of hypochondria and actual 
insanity among writers in the eighteenth century than at 
any other time. This was the case probably among men 
of all occupations. Healthy men were touched with the 
gloom of bondage. Robert Blair's poem on " the Grave " 
published in 1743, dwells far more on the mortality 
within the churchyard than upon the spiritual life be- 
yond. Its most vigorous passage paints fear of the 
churchyard ghost. Edward Young published in 1742-3 
his "Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality," 
occasioned by the death of a married stepdaughter in 
1736, of her husband in 1740, and of his own wife in 1741. 
The gloom in it was implied by the name of its sequel 
"The Consolation," but the note of melancholy runs 
through all. There is less gloom in Gray's " Elegy in a 
Country Churchyard" completed a few years later, but 
the sickness of the times was felt also by Gray. In his 
" Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," the man- 
ner of the musing is characteristic. Now, a crowd of 
boys in a playground would suggest to a moralist fresh 
energies of a generation that shall carry on the labour of 
the present. To Gray it suggested nothing but the mis- 
eries in store for them when they should be men : 

Alas, regardless of their doom 
The little victims play. 

William Collins, whose Odes were published in 1747, 
died insane. Samuel Johnson, with a scrofulous taint of 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 83 

the blood that throughout his life threatened insanity, 
battled against poverty without and disease within. His 
firm resolve and his strong hold upon religion gave him 
mastery, and he came to be the main support of the best 
intellectual life of his time. No thought was healthier 
than his of the strong soul that overcame in daily combat 
the infirmities of bodily disease. When the wit and fash- 
ion of London gathered at last around the shambling 
shortsighted man, still destitute of the world's wealth, 
whose features had been made harsh, and manners rudely 
abrupt, by the physical condition over which in all essen- 
tials he was master, his fearless sincerity gave to his life 
a grandeur that men felt. He taught others to look, like 
himself, through all the fleeting accidents of life to that 
in which a man can really live, and there were none who 
came to know him without learning how pure a sprmg of 
love and tenderness kept the whole nature fresh within. 
Firml}^ attached to the established Church, Johnson was 
a stout Tory on the religious side of his life and held the 
First Georges in such contempt as, it may be said, their 
lives had duly earned for them. But no delusions of 
23arty feeling dimmed his sense of human brotherhood, 
and of the large interests of humanity. Negro slavery 
was to his mind so gross a wrong that he startled a polite 
company one day with a toast " to the next Insurrection 
of the Blacks." The political corruption of his time 
caused Johnson in his Dictionary, which appeared in 
1755, to define "Pension" as "a grant made to any one 
without an equivalent," and " Pensioner " as " a slave of 
state, hired by a stipend to obey his master." In 1T60, 
when he was fifty-two years old, liis friends, holding it 
unendurable that one who had served England so well 



84 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

should live in poverty, obtained a pension for him of 
.£300 a year. When told what had been done, he took 
a day for reflection, and then accepted. But his acts 
showed in what spirit he took the grant. For some of 
the money wasted yearly in political corruption he would 
find a better use. He sheltered in his home five other 
persons who deserved help and without it would have 
sunk to ruin. Johnson lived with them as his friends, 
respected them, secured for them respect. One was a 
negro servant of a friend who could no longer keep him. 
Johnson took charge of him and he was known as Dr. 
Johnson's man, but Johnson gave him liberal education, 
wrote to him as " Dear Francis," subscribing " Yours 
affectionately," and through him made living protest 
against the notion that man can be made other than man 
by the colour of his skin. Johnson's pension sustained 
five lives and gave him means of occasional help to suf- 
ferers whom he came near. Once when he found a ruined 
woman who had fainted in the streets he took her up on 
his broad back, carried her to his home, and made what 
effort he could to save her. The best life of the time, 
the life that was struggling to lift the age above its petty 
formalisms to a large sense of what men really live for, 
breathed and moved in Johnson. He was sixty -nine years 
old when he began, and seventy-three when he completed, 
in 1781, his " Lives of the Poets." When the booksellers 
asked him to write them for an edition of the poets then 
in preparation and requested him to name his price, he 
asked only ^200. They gave him more, though still less 
than the work was worth, but when the insufficient pay- 
ment was suggested to him as a matter of complaint, he 
answered, " No, it is not that they gave me too little, but 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, 85 

that I gave tliem too much." He was no grumbler him- 
self, and no encourager of idle grumbling. " I hate," he 
said, ''a complainer." It was characteristic of French 
critical influence that " the Poets " according to the book- 
sellers, that is to say, the salable Poets, all wrote after 
the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Johnson's power had 
grown with the time, and he so far shared the reaction 
against formalism in his style, that the English of his 
*' Lives of the Poets " differs distinctly from the English 
of his " Rambler." In these latter days Johnson said of 
Robertson the historian, '^ If his style is bad, that is, too 
big words and too many of them, I am afraid he caught 
it of me." Johnson died in December 1784, four or five 
years before the fall of the Bastille. William Words- 
worth was a boy of fourteen when Johnson died, and 
William Cowper was then writing his " Task." 

If we glance at the historians we still find the drift of 
the time marked by the course of English Literature. 
There had been imperial annals, developed after the inven- 
tion of printing from the familiar form of the monastic 
chronicle ; there had been also histories of special periods, 
like Bacon's '' History of the Reign of Henry the Seventh " 
or Clarendon's " History of the Rebellion ; " but there had 
been no attempt to trace cause and effect through the 
whole sequence of English history. David Hume, who 
began his literary life in 1738, at the age of 27, with a 
"Treatise on Human Nature," and in his subsequent 
writings on Politics and the Principles of Morals had 
blended the sceptical spirit of the time with clear discus- 
sion of the chief problems of life, was made in 1752 
Librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh. 
Access to books suggested to him the writing of what was 



86 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

first planned as a suggestive special history. A quarto 
volume on the reigns of James I. and Charles I. appeared 
in 1745. It was decried and neglected. Only forty-five 
copies were sold in a twelvemonth. It was not Hume's 
first experience of neglect, but he always had worked on, 
unchecked by apparent failure. Having published in the 
intervening year a '^ Natural History of Religion," Hume 
continued his English History in 1756 from the Death of 
Charles I. to the Revolution. In 1759 he prefixed to his 
published work a History of the House of Tudor, and in 
1761 he stepped farther back, and thus completed the first 
" History of England " that attempted to bring all into 
one narrative, told throughout from the writer's point of 
view with a philosophical sense of the sequence of events. 
With the scepticism of the reaction yet more marked, and 
a warmth of imagination, wanting in Hume, to give life to 
a style still dignified with Latin English Edward Gibbon, 
in the year of Hume's death, 1776, published the first vol- 
ume of his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." 
The last volume was published a year before the French 
Revolution. Yolney's " Ruins of Empires " was published 
in France in September 1791, and Gibbon's theme was 
suggested to him by the decrepitude of the French mon- 
archy, and the vague general sense of corrupt governments 
upon the road to ruin. Among the ruins of the Capitol 
it had occurred to him that the story of the fall of the 
great power of Rome would tend to show what makes 
the weakness and the strength of states. 

Pictures of individual life were at the same time 
developed by the novelists, who first became in the eigh- 
teenth century a power in Literature, Defoe broke this 
new ground with his " Robinson Crusoe " in 1719, which 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 87 

did not call itself a novel, but was an exact imitation of a 
book of Voyage and Adventure. In the loneliness of 
Crusoe on his island Defoe expressed his own sense of 
political isolation. The interest in the book lies in its 
picture of self-reliance tempered with religious faith. 
Defoe's other novels also imitated other forms of litera- 
ture, for vivid expression of life as it really is. The exam- 
ple set by his " Robinson Crusoe " spread to Germany, 
and gave rise there to many imitations. Then followed 
in 1726 " Gulliver's Travels." Pastoral heroic French 
romances kept the field as novels proper until Richardson, 
Fielding and Smollett first gave dignity to the novel as a 
distinct form of English Literature upon which the highest 
genius may be wisely spent. Richardson began in 1741 
with his " Pamela," which attacked conventional notions 
of dignity by giving the name of a romance heroine to a 
servant girl Pamela Andrews. Richardson, who was not 
himself free from all prejudices of his day, rewarded 
virtue in his Pamela by giving her for husband a rascal 
who happened also to be the Squire. Henry Fielding was 
prompted to ridicule this weak point in a book professing 
to advance morality, and began to write adventures of 
Pamela's brother Joseph, as a jest on hers. But having 
begun to write a novel, Fielding found his strength. 
" Joseph Andrews," published in 1742, was very much 
more than a jest upon Pamela. Life was painted, follies 
of society were satirized, and in Parson Adams there was 
Fielding's picture of a Christian and a scholar who, hav- 
ing the soul of a gentleman, is brought by his simplicity 
into the most ridiculous positions, but whom nothing can 
make ridiculous. He is rolled in a pigsty and is not the less 
a gentleman, towards whom we feel kindly affection and a 



88 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

high respect. In 1748 Richardson followed with his best 
novel, Clarissa Harlowe, where a shrewd religious man's 
quick interest in life, kindliest feeling, and the giving of 
his whole mind to his work with a complete faith in his 
own creation, enabled him to produce the effect of a work 
of genius, without the aid of genius in producing it. In 
1749 Fielding also published his chief novel, Tom Jones. 
It was his chief novel because largest of design, an image 
of the world of man, and in Tom Jones and Blifil of the 
right and the wrong way of taking life. Tom Jones errs 
much, but he is what he seems to be, and out of his own 
sincerity has faith in the sincerity of others. Blifil excels 
him in observance of the forms of worth, but he is in- 
sincere, and acts in the belief that, others being like him- 
self, no man is to be trusted. The book breathes health. 
The convention of the time did not forbid a direct pictur- 
ing of its evil ; but the coarse scenes in Fielding's novels 
are given always for what they are, with no false gloss 
upon them. Whenever Tom Jones sins against the purity 
of his love for Sophia his wrong doing is made in some 
way to part him from her, and when he pleads towards 
the close of the story, the difference between men and 
women, and the different codes of morality by which they 
are judged in society. Fielding makes Sophia answer, " I 
will never marry a man who is not as incapable as I am 
myself of making such a distinction." The charm of 
genius enters into the whole texture of thought in Field- 
ing's novels. A page of his is to a page of Richardson's as 
silk to sackcloth. In his next novel " Amelia " Fielding 
sought to paint the excellence of womanhood. Every- 
where his vigour is tempered with a kindly humour that 
causes us to read, seldom laughing, but always, as it were 



OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE. 89 

with an iindersmile, in a good humour that gives ready 
entrance to the wisdom of the thought so uttered. There is 
no bitterness even when, in his keen irony upon false esti- 
mates of human greatness, " Jonathan Wild the Great," 
a notorious thief and thiefcatcher, stands as a type of the 
Great Alexanders, as in Gay's " Beggar's Opera " Pea- 
chum and Locket were meant to be taken for statesmen of 
the eighteenth century. The youngest of this group of 
novelists, Tobias Smollett, produced his first novel, '' Rod- 
erick Random," in 1748, the year of Richardson's " Cla- 
rissa ; " his last novel, '' Humphrey Clinker," a few months 
before his death. He died in 1771. Smollett's novels 
were light-hearted pictures of life and character as they 
appeared to a quick witted observer who, though he 
painted as an observer from outside, never missed the 
points that made a sketch of incident or character amus- 
ing. He was a hard-working man of letters. His con- 
tinuation of Hume's History of England into his own 
times ended with the year 1762, and was published in 
1769. It had in its day a success as great as that obtained 
in our own day by Macaulay's History, but time has told 
upon its reputation. 

Another novelist was Laurence Sterne whose "Tris- 
tram Shandy," rich in playful wit, began to appear in 
1759. The last published volume of a book that was 
not finished and had no aim or end beyond amusement, 
appeared in 1767. Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," pub- 
lished in 1768, the year of his death, owes part of its 
character to the fact that it was written a few years after 
the chief sentimental writings of Rousseau. 

The reaction in France was advancing. The corruption 
of Society was inveighed against by young philosophers, 



90 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

one of whom, Helv^tius, said that if an angel came from 
heaven to teach men to live reasonable lives, he would no 
more be listened to than the philosopher who was accused 
to the Athenian youths of pronouncing tarts to be un- 
wholesome. Voltaire represented the revolt of the intel- 
lect against bondage of convention, and Rousseau the revolt 
of the emotions. 

Rousseau had rejected the positive idea of Duty, and 
taken Sensibility for rule of conduct. "The Heart is 
good," he said, " listen to it ; suffer yourself to be led by 
Sensibility and you will never stray, or your stray ings 
will be of a creditable sort." This outbreak of the emo- 
tional part of human nature after long suffering from the 
restraints of a cold formalism, had its form determined by 
Rousseau's genius and eloquence. In 1750 Rousseau ob- 
tained, by arguing against the benefits of civilization, the 
prize offered by the Aeademy of Dijon for an essay on 
the origin of the inequality among men, and whether it is 
authorised by natural law. In arguing afterwards, with 
delightful shrewdness, against an advocate of civilization, 
Rousseau exalted man in a state of nature, traced still 
to overcivilization the corruption of mankind, and said, 
though he thought it a hard thing to say, that the savage 
on the banks of the Orinoco who discovered that by bind- 
ing a board to the skull of an infant he could so flatten it 
as to repress the development of the brain was a bene- 
factor to society. In 1761 Rousseau represented life in 
action from his sentimental point of view in the "Nou- 
velle Heloise," in 1762 he published under the name of 
" Emile " his view of education, and in the same year his 
"Contrat Social," a scheme of society idealised in his 
own way from the principles of the English Revolution 



OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE. 91 

and the Dutch Declaration of Independence. This book 
had more influence than any other publication on the 
views of men who endeavoured to shape in France an ideal 
Commonwealth after the fall of monarchy at the Revolu- 
tion of 1789. 

In England as in France writers dwelt upon the ine- 
qualities among men. Goldsmith's " Traveller," published 
in 1764, glanced over Europe, saw in each country its bless- 
ing and its curse, and dwelt upon the contrast in England 
between luxury and poverty. The thought in the Traveller 

Have we not seen at Pleasure's lordly call 
The smiling, long frequented village fall ? 

was fully developed afterwards, in the poem of "the 
Deserted Village ; " but it is not to be overlooked that in 
the last lines of " the Traveller " Goldsmith pointed to a 
remedy for ills of life, not in political revolution, but in 
that development of the true life within each heart and 
home towards w^hich we in the nineteenth century are 
labouring. This note was struck clearly by Goldsmith 
and by Cowper before it became the master note of 
Wordsworth's verse, and master thought of a succeeding 
generation. The like pathos and kindly satire against 
false sentiment in Goldsmith's " Vicar of Wakefield," pub- 
lished in 1766, caused that book to bring some of its own 
health to the mind even of young Goethe. Moreover, if 
one Scotsman wrote " the Man of Feeling " another wrote 
in those days " the Wealth of Nations " and helped soci- 
ety by laying firm foundations for the study of political 
economy. Adam Smith's " Wealth of Nations " was pub- 
lished in the same year as " the Vicar of Wakefield," and 
four years after Rousseau's " Contrat Social." 



92 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

William Cowper, withdrawn from active life by the 
infirmity that caused, even in his calm country retire- 
ment, the gloom of insanity to fall upon his cheerful 
mind, knew the world and its stir only from afar. But 
he expressed in his ^' Task," published in 1785, the feeling 
caught by his sensitive mind from the sense of oppres- 
sion that pervaded Europe. He blended with generous 
expression of the English love of liberty, his pictures of 
what seemed the decay of society, the conventions of the 
town and of the church, the unjust wars, cruelties of the 
slave trade, and exclaimed 

My ear is pained, 
My soul is sick, with every day's report 
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled. 
There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart, 
It does not feel for man. 

He denounced the Bastille four years before its fall: 

Ye horrid towers, the abode of broken hearts ; 
Ye dungeons, and ye cages of despair, 
That monarchs have supplied from age to age 
With music such as suits their sovereign ears, 
The sighs and groans of miserable men ! 
There's not an English heart that would not leap 
To hear that ye were fallen at last. 

The Bastille fell on the 14th of July 1789. " Liberty, 
Fraternity, Equality " was the cry, and the hope of thou- 
sands of enthusiastic dreamers, whose feeling was that 
ascribed by Wordsworth to the Solitary in his early days, 

For, lo, the dread Bastille 
With all the chambers in its horrid towers, 
Fell to the groimd ; by violence overthrown 
Of indignation, and with shouts that drowned 



OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE. 93 

The crash it made in falling. From the wreck 
A golden palace rose, or seemed to rise, 
The appointed seat of equitable law 
And mild paternal sway. 

The political feeling of those times in England is 
illustrated throughout by the sj)eeches and writings of 
Edmund Burke. At the age of about seven and twenty- 
he published, in 1756, a satire on the French philosoph- 
ical tendency to contrast the virtues of the natural man 
with the vices of a corrupt civilization. When the impe- 
rial policy of George III., and of those who called them- 
selves the King's friends, was taxing the American colonies 
for the profit of England, and the colonists objected to 
taxation by a Parliament in which they were not repre- 
sented, Burke's rare ability was made known to the Mar- 
quis of Rockingham. He became Rockingham's private 
secretary in July 1765, at the time when Rockingham, 
becoming premier, had the great difficulty of the day 
to deal with. Burke was essentially conservative. He 
dreaded Revolution and all sudden violence of change. 
His policy in the American dispute aimed at the staying 
of the strife. You claim imperial right to tax ; claim it, 
then, he said. The American colonists refuse to bear 
imperial taxation ; then do not impose it. Satisfy your- 
selves with formal declaration of your right; and them, 
by not using it. That was the policy on which Rocking- 
ham acted. If the king and his friends had been wiser 
than they were, there would have been no war with the 
American colonies, no Declaration of Independence ; no 
founding in the new world of a great English Republic 
to take large part in the building of man's future. The 
blindness of rulers was, in this case, like the blindness of 



94 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

rulers in the days before the English Revolution, only 
opening the way to better things. When cause and effect 
lie both before us in the remoter and the nearer past, we 
learn to look with Milton in calm of mind upon the dark- 
est and most doubtful times, for even through the foolish- 
ness of man God's will is done. Burke pleaded for the 
American colonists, that he might avert violent change. 
But by the outbreak of the great French Revolution, 
not only was a violent change begun, but it was a change 
of the kind that he most dreaded. Idealists were making 
a clean sweep of government, law, and many of the most 
cherished traditions and beliefs of men, to build up all 
anew according to their fancies. The enthusiasm ran as 
fire, the neighbour's house burned, England might burn 
next. With passionate eloquence Burke warred against 
the French Revolution. Feelings like his prompted the 
part taken by England in the attempt to crush it out by 
force. War against French Revolution was the school in 
which Napoleon was bred, and after a short peace there 
followed war against Napoleon which lasted until Water- 
loo. 

There was no failure of the French Revolution that at 
the close of the last century represented over all Europe 
the revolt against forms of authority from which the life 
was gone. Failure was of the mistaken means, not of the 
aims. Thomas Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope," pub- 
lished in the last year of the eighteenth century, when its 
author was but a youth of twenty-one or twenty-two, was 
as the last word of the dying century to its successor, full 
of ardent expectation of such a future as wisdom of 
Greece or Rome never conceived. 

The man whom Rousseau and others had supposed to 



OF ENGLISH LITEEATUBE. 95 

be overcivilized, was not half civilized. It would be 
overpraise of human society, even as it now is, to describe 
it as half civilized. But the hope of a high future was 
set by the young poet of hope against all the wrongs and 
cruelties that were about him in the world. I watch, he 
said, 

I watch the wheels of Nature's mazy plan 
And learn the future by the past of man. 

When William Wordsworth took his stand in the 
"Lyrical Ballads," published in 1798, against all insin- 
cerity of diction, and sought to draw from man the truest 
note in the great harmony of Nature, he felt, as every 
poet of that day felt keenly, the discords of life and 
" what man has made of man." 

Robert Burns, true poet of nature, published his first 
volume of poems at Kilmarnock in the autumn of 1786. 
In 1787 the fame of "the Ayrshire Ploughman" spread 
through England. Until his death in 1796 he poured out 
natural song, often tinged deeply with the feeling of the 
time. He sent a couple of carronades as a present to 
the National Assembly. 

Wordsworth's sense of what man has made of man 
caused him not only to be one of those Englishmen whose 
hearts leapt at the fall of the Bastille, but drew him in 
his youth into direct fellowship with the French Revolu- 
tionists. He too believed, in his inexperience, that a great 
effort of humanity might in a few years turn wrong into 
right. He shared the brightest dreams of the first days 
of such effort. 

Through this living interest in the great hope, and this 
participation in its energies, Wordsworth was first among 



96 A GLANCE AT THE PAST 

all poets to read the riddle of the failure that caused 
many to despair. That which had been sought was rightly- 
sought. The great awakening to sense of a life for man 
far other than that which had bred impatience of its mean- 
ness, was a real awakening, from which the nations must 
not sink back into sleep. But Burke was right in his dis- 
trust of the means by which a regeneration was to be 
attained. A state can be no better than the citizens who 
are its substance. Transmute these. The process of their 
transmutation is slow, painfully slow ; but the way is 
known, and it is the only way that can lead to a real civili- 
zation of the world. Here and there some man lives a 
noble life, wins honour from all, unless his work be such 
as begets blindness of party strife, and he is remembered 
in story for his worthy deeds. Wordsworth asked boldly 
the question. 

Why is this glorious creature to be found 
One only in ten thousand ? What one is 
Why may not millions be ? 

Endeavour suddenly to change the characters of men has 
failed, but there remains a no less strenuous resolve to 
attain that at which the Revolution aimed. Wordsworth 
himself in his "Excursion," published in 1814, which was 
a poetical expression of the problem of society as he then 
understood it, urged the duty of the state to provide edu- 
cation for every child born in the land, as a first condition 
of the shaping of good citizens. He held, and rightly 
held, that free England's place was still that of a leader 
among the nations, and that from her the light was to 
spread, by advance, through her, of a true culture, 



OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 97 

Even till the smallest habitable rock 
Beaten by lonely billows, hear the songs 
Of humanized society. 

And so we come to the motive force that directs all the 
best energies of England in the reign of Queen Victoria. 
We have seen already that when the minds of men are 
stirred about essentials, life finds its highest utterance, 
and Literature, the voice of life, is at its best. For this 
reason there was in England at the beginning of the 
Nineteenth Century a fresh development of power. The 
genius of Byron represented the whole passionate move- 
ment of the Revolutionary time, and most clearly ex- 
pressed sympathy with the nations who desired to throw 
off tyranny and be themselves. Shelley's poetry expressed 
the pure ideal of the Revolution, the sense of what hu- 
manity should be and was not, resentment of all that was 
base, and confusion of the God whose true spirit of love 
and justice breathed on almost every page of Shelley's 
verse with an image of God that dishonoured Him, and 
was among the forms made to be broken. Keats had the 
revived sense of beauty in God's world, and expressed 
through it, in his fragment of '' Hyperion," the aspiration 
of the time. As the old Titans gave place to the younger 
gods, 

So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, 
A power more strong in beauty, born of us 
And fated to excel us. 

One aid to the work of our time has come from the 
dying out of prejudices that restrained women from writ- 
ing. Jane Austen's novels all appeared between 1811 and 
1818, but there was an interval of fifteen years between 



98 A GLANCE AT THE PAST. 

the writing of the three first published and the three that 
followed. She painted such pictures of real life as she 
had seen as a girl in a quiet country parsonage. Like 
"Wordsworth, she sought to show the charm that lies under 
the common things about us, and with a fine feminine 
humour, under sentences clear, simple, and exactly fitted 
to expression of a shrewd good sense, she came nearer to 
Fielding than any novelist who wrote before the reign of 
Queen Victoria. Miss Edge worth began novel writing 
in Ireland in the first years of the Nineteenth Century. 
She sketched the Irish character about her with a quick 
perception that tended everywhere to correction of abuses 
and increase of kindly feeling. From her the greatest 
novelist of his time, Sir Walter Scott, said that he had 
the first impulse to write novels that painted Scottish 
character. With the higher genius of a poet colouring 
their kindly views of man and nature, Scott's novels then 
became for many minds a spring of health. 



IN THE EEIGN OF VICTOEIA. 



CHAPTER IV. 

OF THOSE WHO WERE OLD AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 
BEIGN; AND OF THE POETS, WORDSWORTH, SOUTHEY, 
LANDOR. 

After the death of William IV. at two o'clock in the 
morning on the 20th of June 1837, his niece Victoria 
Alexandrina, whose father died within the first year of her 
life, and who had been quietly educated by her mother, 
became Queen of England. She had then just entered 
her nineteenth year. The duration of that part of the 
Reign of Victoria which is a part of history at the time 
when this narrative is written, exactly corresponds with 
the forty-four years and four months of the whole Reign 
of Elizabeth. 

Most of the great poets of the preceding time had passed 
away. Keats died in 1821; Shelley, in 1822; Byron, in 
1824 : but if they had lived, Keats would have been at the 
beginning of the reign only forty-one years old ; Shelley, 
forty-five ; and Byron, forty-nine. Keats, indeed, was a 
year younger than Thomas Carlyle, with whose death this 
narrative closes. Sir Walter Scott had been dead nearly 
five years in June 1837. He was a year younger than 



100 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Wordsworth, who lived until 1850. Coleridge, who was a 
year younger than Scott, had died in the house of his 
friend Mr. Gillman at Highgate in July 1834. His eldest 
son Hartley, born in 1796, and his one daughter Sara, 
lived ; and there was in each of them a touch of the 
father's genius. In Hartley Coleridge there was a touch 
also of his father's weakness. He obtained a fellowship at 
Oriel and having lost it, through fault of his own, was for 
a time in London, then sought unsuccessfully to earn a 
livelihood by teaching, and depended afterwards upon his 
pen. He had published in 1826 a book on the " Worthies 
of Lancashire and Yorkshire," and a volume of poems at 
Leeds in 1833. He lived for some time at Rydal, where 
he died in 1849. His poems in two volumes, and a volume 
of " Essays and Marginalia," were edited by his brother in 
1851. Hartley Coleridge's sister Sara, of whose training, 
in her earlier years, her father's friend Southey had charge, 
married in 1829 her cousin Henry Nelson Coleridge, a 
Chancery barrister. During the first years of the Reign 
of Victoria, nephew and daughter were engaged as hus- 
band and wife in cherishing the poet's memory. The 
husband edited " Letters, Conversations and Recollec- 
tions " of Coleridge in 1836, also his '' Table Talk," and 
in 1839 his " Literary Remains " in four volumes. The 
wife edited in 1840 her father's " Confessions of an In- 
quiring Spirit," gave a new edition of his " Biographia 
Literaria," in 1847, and his '' Notes and Lectures upon 
Shakespeare" in 1849, and his "Essays on his own Times." 
Henry Nelson Coleridge died in 1843. Sara Coleridge, 
who published also in 1837 a charming fairy tale of her 
own, " Phantasmion," lived until 1852. Her "Memoirs 
and Letters " were edited by her daughter in 1873. 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 101 

Robert Southey, in the days of his youth, fired by the 
wild hopes of the French Revolution, and sharing its re- 
sentment of what man has made of man, had planned 
with Coleridge and other kindred spirits a retreat from 
the old worn-out world to the banks of the Susquehanna, 
where they were to found an all-equal-government, a 
Pant-iso-cracy. Since they would need wives Southey 
had suggested three Miss Frickers in his native Bristol, 
one of whom, Edith, he marked for himself, the other two 
might become — did become — wives to two other Pant- 
isocrats. Coleridge took one of them, Sara, for his wife ; 
and Robert Lovell, who died young, took another. When 
Lovell died, leaving a widow with an infant, Southey was 
thrown upon his own resources, with a hard battle to fight, 
but he added Lovell's widow and child to his own domes- 
tic cares. When Coleridge afterwards was ill able to 
help himself, much of the burden of Coleridge's family 
Avas borne also by his hardworking and faithful friend. 
Southey, like Coleridge, after experience of vanity in all 
the hopes inspired by the French Revolution, lost faith in 
reform sought by the way of sudden change, and, roughly 
speaking, took his place with the conservatives. In 1813, 
on the death of Henry James Pye, Southey had been made 
Poet Laureate. He was Laureate, therefore, and sixty- 
three years old — Wordsworth was sixty-seven — at the 
accession of Victoria. When Southey died, in 1843, he 
had held for forty years the office which then passed to 
his friend Wordsworth, and of which since the death of 
Wordsworth in 1850, the renewed dignity has been sus- 
tained by Alfred Tennyson. 

The oldest writers who lived at the beginning of the 
reign of Queen Victoria, and had not wholly ceased to 



102 OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE 

produce, were Joanna Baillie, 75 years old; Samuel 
Rogers, 74 ; Robert Plumer Ward, 72 ; Miss Edgeworth, 
70; and Isaac D'Israeli, 70. Joanna Baillie had pub- 
lished her first "Plays on the Passions" in 1798. In 1809 
Walter Scott had superintended the production of a play 
of hers at Edinburgh, and in 1836 she had published 
three more volumes of plays. Though her plays may be 
little read in future time, two or three homely ballads 
written by her in her earlier days, such as, " Woo'd and 
Married and a' " or " The Weary Pund o' Tow " will live 
with other delicate and homely pieces which have the 
simple tenderness or playfulness of old ballads that were 
written often, there is reason to think, by cultivated wo- 
men. So Lady Nairne who died in 1845, aged 79, wrote 
" the Laird o' Cockpen," " Caller Herrin' " and " The Land 
o' the Leal." Joanna Baillie lived very quietly at Hamp- 
stead during the first fourteen years of the reign, and died 
at the age of 89, in 1851. Miss Edgeworth died two years 
earlier, and though her active life as an author closed in 
1834, she published a last novel, " Orlandino," in the year 
before her death. 

Samuel Rogers lived to be yet older than Joanna Bail- 
lie. His age was 74 at the beginning of the reign, and 
he was in his ninety-fourth year when he died, in Decem- 
ber, 1855. His old age was not spent in seclusion. He 
was a banker's son, and derived wealth in after life from 
his own partnership in the bank. He had poetic feeling, 
sociable instincts, a shrewd sharp wit in conversation, and 
a ready kindness. If he had been born poor, he might 
have been a poet of considerable power. He made his 
reputation, in 1792, when he was thirty, with " the Pleas- 
ures of Memory." It was the best of a group of books, 



II{ THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 103 

" Pleasures of Refinement," " Pleasures of Charity," etc., 
which had been suggested to imitative writers by the 
success of Akenside's " Pleasures of Imagination." Aken- 
side's '* Pleasures of Imagination " was a rhetorical poem, 
first published when he was a young man, and in good 
accordance with the fashion of its time. Rogers's "Pleas- 
ures of Memory " was not only better than any other 
imitation of Akenside, but it was better than Akenside. 
There was a simpler and a truer grace of style, due partly 
to change of literary fashion ; a theme pleasant to every 
reader ; and the ease of a man of taste who could give 
and take refined pleasure, but " whose sails were never to 
the tempest given." Samuel Rogers might have become 
an English author of great mark if, at some time before 
he was forty years old, his bank had broken. His poem 
of "Italy" was published in an elegant manner, and 
maintained his credit. The shrewd wit of Rogers's con- 
versation ought to have shown only the social side of an 
intellectual vigour that stirred in his writing; but as 
writer, his whole vitality was never shown. In the reign 
of Victoria it was for many years the principal charm of a 
social breakfast table. Samuel Rogers's breakfasts were 
in the reign of Victoria what suppers at the Mermaid had 
been in Elizabeth's time ; no doubt a highly civilized 
variation from the older fashion. The foremost men in 
politics, literature and art were among Rogers's guests, 
and in the wit combats the venerable host could parry 
and thrust with the nimblest. 

Robert Plumer Ward, who was 72 in 1837, had begun 
life as a barrister, and in 1805, having entered parliament, 
he became Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs under 
Lord Mulgrave. In 1807 he was a Lord of the Admi- 



104 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ralty, and from 1811 to 1823, when he retired from public 
life, he was Clerk of the Ordnance. He inserted the 
name Plumer between his Christian and surname to please 
the second of his three wives. Robert Plumer Ward 
made his more permanent mark as a writer with two 
novels, "Tremaine" in 1825 and "De Vere " in 1827. 
They painted society and political life, and in society 
were popular, although their tone was that of a thought- 
ful, cultivated man whose speculations touched essentials 
and who asked thought from his reader. Robert Plumer 
Ward continued to write during the earlier years of the 
reign of Victoria. In 1838 he published "Illustrations 
of Human Life." He discussed in another book Avhat he 
took to be "the Real Character of the Revolution of 
1688." In 1841 and 1844 he produced novels, " De Clif- 
ford," and " Chatsworth." In 1846 he died, aged 81, and 
in 1850 the Hon. E. Phipps published his " Memoirs and 
Literary Remains." 

The last of the septuagenarians who remained active 
after the accession of Victoria was Isaac DTsraeli, father 
of a more famous son. He was the son of a Venetian 
merchant, settled in England, and drawn from his father's 
profession by a love of books. At two and twenty he 
printed " A Poetical Epistle on Abuse of Satire " and 
in 1791, at the age of 24, published the first volume of 
the series by which he is best remembered, " The Curi- 
osities of Literature." Two years later, a second volume 
followed. From 1794 to 1811 he was unsuccessfully 
endeavouring to earn a place as original author, by poems, 
romances and novels. In 1812 he produced another book 
in the style of the Curiosities of Literature, called "the 
Calamities of Authors ; " in 1814 followed " the Quarrels 



I2{ THE BEIGJSr OF VICTORIA. 105 

of Authors." Then, after some historical disquisition on 
James I., with which he began the expression of his good 
will to the Stuarts, there followed in 1817 a third volume 
of " the Curiosities of Literature." This being the work 
of his that succeeded, there followed in 1823 three vol- 
umes of a second series of '' Curiosities of Literature ; " 
after which he produced, in 1828-31, five volumes of 
" Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the 
First." The Last of Isaac D'Israeli's books of gatherings 
was published in 1841, two years after he had become 
blind. It was called "Amenities of Literature." Nine 
years after the appearance of that book, he died, at the 
age of 83. Isaac DTsraeli's Curiosities and Amenities of 
Literature, Calamities and Quarrels of Authors, are odds 
and ends of the reading of a man who looked out actively 
for interesting bits of life and character, and took pleas- 
ure in carrying his reading along byways of literary life. 
He persuaded himself, in a mild way, that he was gath- 
ering materials for a History of English Literature, and 
he mined diligently for hidden treasures. But his heaps 
are unsifted, and the higher qualities of mind were little 
used in bringing them together. Isaac DTsraeli had a 
love for books beyond that of a trifler. There is human 
interest in each of his scraps, and suggestiveness in his 
manner of grouping them. The books must always be 
entertaining; and they may be occasionally useful to a 
student who will take the trouble, by his own reading, 
to correct or verify, and by his own thinking to get the 
light required for a right seeing of any supposed fact. In 
Isaac DTsraeli's account of Gabriel Harvey, for exa^-iple, 
there is not a sentence without at least one error in it, 
expressed or implied ; yet all is honestly based on read- 



106 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUEE 

ing. The errors come of reading without balancing au- 
thorities, or testing statements by known facts, or weighing 
evidence in any way. The lights and shades of truth are 
hard to get, and when got they take sharpness of effect, 
or what the ignorant call clearness, from a story. Many 
a man may be said to take great pains to spoil his work 
for all readers except the thoughtful. Isaac DTsraeli's 
fault is really, perhaps, inseparable from the kind of book 
on which his credit rests, and his are by far the best books 
of their kind. If the strictest of English scholars were 
so much of a magician that he could cause at will what 
books he pleased to be forgotten, he would never deprive 
himself and others of these pleasant stores of literary 
small talk. 

Still following along the course of life the course of 
time, we turn now to those writers who at the accession 
of Victoria were between sixty and seventy years old; 
some of them still capable of ripe and energetic work, all 
working still in cordial fellowship with younger men 
whose turn it was to be chief builders for the future. 
Among those who had been most active in the preceding 
generation was the great master builder, William Words- 
worth, whose age at the beginning of the reign was sixty- 
seven. Southey was sixty-three, and Walter Savage 
Landor sixty-two. Then there were the men who had 
given new life and new means of continued life to the 
free conflict of opinion, by helping to found the Edin- 
burgh Review and Blackwood's Magazine: Francis Jeffrey 
who in 1837 was sixty-four years old, Sydney Smith 
who was sixty-eight, — their younger comrade Brougham 
was fifty-eight — and John Wilson, who was sixty-two. 
Thomas Campbell, who had sung " the Pleasures of Hope " 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA, 107 

at the close of the eighteenth century, was sixty, and 
James Montgomery was sixty-six. 

William Wordsworth, son of John Wordsworth, an 
attorney who was law agent to Sir James Lowther, after- 
wards Earl of Lonsdale, was born on the 7th of April 
1770. His father had married Anne Cookson, daughter 
of a draper at Penrith. There were five children by the 
marriage, four boys and a girl. Richard the eldest, who 
became a lawyer, then William and Dorothy, Christopher 
and John. — Christopher, who Avas trained for the Church, 
became Fellow, and afterwards Master, of Trinity Col- 
lege, Cambridge. He was Master of Trinity in 1837, but 
resigned in 1840 and died in 1846. He edited a collection 
of Ecclesiastical Biography, and argued for King Charles's 
authorship of "Eikon Basilike." One of his sons, also 
named Christopher, and also a writer of books, is the 
present Bishop of Lincoln (1881). Among his writings 
is a book on " Greece, Pictorial, Descriptive and Histori- 
cal," published in 1840, with books of Biblical criticism, 
and on the state of Education and Religion in France and 
Italy. — William, Dorothy and John were the three chil- 
dren of the family who were especially bound one to 
another, for there was in each of them the poetic tempera- 
ment. When William was eight years old he lost his 
mother. He and his brother Christopher were sent soon 
afterwards to school at Hawkshead, a picturesque village 
between Esthwaite and Coniston lakes, where there is one 
of the grammar schools that were founded in the time of 
Queen Elizabeth. The boys lodged with Dames in the 
cottages round about, and in the cottage of Anne Tyson 
William Wordsworth had a happy home with freedom to 
ramble at will over the hills. He was at school at Hawks- 



108 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

head, a boy of fourteen, when he heard of his father's 
death. Sir James Lowther, to whose estates John Words- 
worth had been agent, had borrowed nearly all the money 
that his agent had, five thousand pounds, and refused to 
repay it. What remained was lost in the endeavour to 
recover what was gone. When Sir James died, as Lord 
Lonsdale, in 1802, his successor made amends to the 
utmost of his power. He paid to the family the principal 
due, with ample interest, and he remained a cordial friend. 
To him Wordsworth dedicated his "Excursion," and it 
was he who, by obtaining for him a small salaried office 
in Westmoreland, enabled the poet in his later years to 
unite " plain living and high thinking " free from anxiety 
lest bread should fail. But until 1801 the young Words- 
w^orths were an orphan family, dependent on two uncles 
for their maintenance. Their uncles proposed to edu- 
cate both William and Christopher for the Church, and 
William was sent from Hawkshead school, in October 
1787, to St. John's College, Cambridge. He loved the 
poets ; his own skill in verse had been encouraged by the 
head master at Hawkshead, the Rev. William Taylor, who 
died not long before Wordsworth left the school, Words- 
worth being among the few elder boys of whom, from his 
death bed, he took leave. More than the poets, Words- 
worth loved that out of which all poetry springs, Man's 
world within him and without him, his to unite, to con- 
quer and possess. At the close of his second session in 
Cambridge Europe felt the fall of the Bastille. He went 
to College at a time when the reaction against formalism, 
the desire towards a truer life for men, stirred even the 
old and was growing to a passion among those of the 
young who had generous hearts and quick imaginations. 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 109 

Wordsworth tells, in the poem published after his death 
as "The Prelude," what ideal of a University he took to 
Cambridge, and how he felt himself repelled by the empti- 
ness of what he found. Colleges and schools had not 
escaped the deadening influences of the preceding time, 
and the resentment of a young enthusiast is in Words- 
worth's picture of what Cambridge seemed to him. 

All degrees 
And shapes of spurious fame and short-lived praise 
Here sate in state, and fed with daily alms 
Retainers won away from solid good : 
And here was Labour, his own bondslave ; Hope, 
That never set the pains against the prize ; 
Idleness halting with his weary clog. 
And poor misguided Shame, and witless Fear, 
And simple Pleasure foraging for Death ; 
Honour misplaced, and Dignity astray ; 
Feuds, factions, flatteries, enmity, and guile 
Murmuring submission, and bald government, 
(The idol w^eak as the idolator) 
And Decency and Custom, starving Truth, 
And blind Authority beating with his staff 
The child that might have led him. 

Wordsworth, well trained at Hawkshead, could meet 
without labour all that Cambridge required of him, if he 
had no desire for University distinction. He read the 
poets, thought his own thoughts, spent the first vacation 
at Hawkshead in the cottage of his old dame Tyson, and 
the second with liis relations at Penrith. During that 
vacation, news of the great movement in France poured 
in on him. Throughout his next year at College his mind 
was stirred by the new hopes for man. When the third 
session was closing, and his uncles wished him to read for 



110 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

honours, lie was more disposed like Brutus to " think of 
the world," and obtained leave to set out with a young 
College friend, Robert Jones, afterwards a Welsh clergy- 
man, for a walk through France to the Alps. With his 
deep enjoyment of external nature, the Alps would at any 
time have drawn Wordsworth across France. But a higher 
pleasure than the Alps could give, he looked for and found 
on his way to them. There was 

France standing on the top of golden hours, 
And human nature seeming born again. 

There he said that he saw 

How bright a face is worn when joy of one 
Is joy for tens of millions. 

He came home, took in January 1791 his B.A. degree, 
and. shrank from entering the Church. But he was money- 
less, dependent on his uncles, and must earn. His bent 
was towards Literature, but with law in the background 
he spent time in London ; then, since hope still beat high 
for the regeneration of the world, and his mind was 
already in France, he discovered the importance of acquir- 
ing a good knowledge of French, and obtained leave to 
spend a little time in learning French among the French. 
In Paris he found too many English, and went honestly 
to live at Blois and Orleans. In October 1792 he returned 
to Paris, a month after the September massacres. While 
he recoiled from the cruelty and outrage that had stained 
the cause of the Revolutionists, he told himself that all 
these evils came of ignorance and brutality among men 
whose minds had been starved through generations of 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. Ill 

oppression. If the thinkers could prevail ; if earnest men 
who knew the way to the right haven could make their 
voices heard among those untaught mariners who only 
added to the tumult of the storm, tliey might escape 
wreck yet. Little as he could do, he could speak French 
and write it ; he did care with all his soul for the great 
hope that, in many a pure and fervent mind, had been 
associated with the outbreak of the Revolution. He would 
give all that he had to give in aid of the endeavour to 
secure the triumph of high thought and generous emotion 
over ignorance and passion. He would take part in the 
work of the Girondists. His uncles saw his danger, and 
by stopping his allowance obliged him to come home at 
the end of 1792. As he wrote to Coleridge in " The Prel- 
ude," if he had not been compelled to return home, 

Doubtless I should then have made common cause 
With some who perished ; haply perished too ; 
A poor mistaken and bewildered oifering, — 
Should to the breast of Nature have gone back, 
With all my resolutions, all my hopes. 

Wordsworth, in England again, was still full of the enthu- 
siasm of the time, with an instinct strong as Milton's had 
been to the poet's calling, and no definite profession con- 
ceived for him by others but the Church or Law. He 
tried Literature by publishing after his return his poem 
called " An Evening Walk, Addressed to a young Lady," 
his sister Dorothy. He published also a poem with a 
mild title, " Descriptive Sketches taken during a Pedes- 
trian Tour among the Alps." The title is mild, and the 
rhymed couplets are not as good as those of Goldsmith's 
" Traveller ; " but the young blood courses through many 



112 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE. 

of Wordsworth's lines, for his theme is the walk across 
France with his friend Jones, and the hopes of the time 
are in it. To his faithful uncles, who were doing their 
full duty by a dead brother's and sister's children, William 
Wordsworth himself must have then presented a some- 
what hopeless problem. 

There came at last an unlooked-for solution. Among 
Wordsworth's friends at Penrith was a young man, Raisley 
Calvert, like himself in social position, for his father had 
been steward to estates of the Duke of Norfolk. At Christ- 
mas 1794 he was dying of consumption, and his friend 
Wordsworth nursed him. Calvert had a little money to 
leave, he knew his friend's aspirations and the bonds of 
fortune by which they were restrained, he knew also of a 
resolute will that justified faith in his future. Raisley 
Calvert left to his friend nine hundred pounds, and Words- 
worth resolved by strictest thrift to secure independence 
henceforth, not for himself only but also for his sister 
Dorothy. She had never known, since their father's death, 
a settled home, but had been taken care of generally by 
relations among whom she visited. Wordsworth resolved 
now to be poet, and as far as was in his power a true 
poet ; finding his own way to the highest utterance within 
his reach, not bending before any gale of fashion, but with 
a resolve, like Milton's, to do all as in his great Taskmas- 
ter's eye. Through the good offices of a friend at Bristol 
he was led to become tenant of a very quiet house called 
Racedown, which lies below the road as it winds round 
the lower slope of Pilsdon Hill, half way between Lyme 
Regis and Crewkerne. To this home he brought his sister 
Dorothy, he five and twenty, she four and twenty, glory- 
ing in the first sense of being mistress of a real home of 



IN THE BEIGJSr OF VICTORIA. 113 

her own. There was no place large enough to contain 
shops within six miles in any direction, and the post came 
in only once a week. The scenery about the house was 
peaceful, and there was fine walking on the hills in the 
direction of the sea. Of Raisley Calvert's legacy, Words- 
worth wrote afterwards to his friend Sir George Beau- 
mont, "Upon the interest of the £900 — X400 being laid 
out in annuity, with X200 deducted from the principal, 
and £100 a legacy to my sister, and £100 more which 
the ' Lyrical Ballads ' have brought me, my sister and I 
continued to live seven years, nearly eight." 

Among the few readers of the little pamphlet of verse 
in which Wordsworth described his walk across France 
to the Alps, had been Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It had 
come to him at the time when he had left Cambridge, 
made Southey's acquaintance, and was deep in the project 
for a Pantisocracy. He had found in Wordsworth's verse 
something that answered to his own enthusiasm for new 
hopes that France had quickened. The scheme for a Pan- 
tisocracy had only brought him a wife. He had lectured 
on Charles the First and on the French Revolution ; had 
preached ; had inspired in rich warm-hearted men a sense 
of his rare genius ; had obtained a small pension from 
the Wedgwoods of Etruria, that he might have leisure 
for intellectual work, and had settled at Nether Stowey 
near the Bristol Channel, partly because another of his 
liberal friends and helpers, Mr. Poole, lived there and was 
the good genius of the place. When Coleridge at Nether 
Stowey learned that William Wordsworth, the author of 
the "Descriptive Sketches" in which he had found an 
ardour akin to his own, was living a few miles from Crew- 
kerne, he walked over to see him. The sudden dropping 



114 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

in iipon them of an enthusiastic poet, who was even a 
little younger than themselves, was a great event to Wil- 
liam and Dorothy. The three became firm friends ; and 
the result of the friendship was that William and Dorothy 
left Racedown to live within reach of Coleridge's daily 
companionship. In July 1797, therefore, Wordsworth and 
his sister settled within two or three miles of Nether 
Stowey at Alfoxden, where Wordsworth had also a son 
of Mr. Basil Montagu living with him as pupil. Not 
long afterwards, in the autumn of that year, WordsAVorth 
and his sister planned a walk with Coleridge to Linton, 
and thought to pay the small expense of the holiday by 
writing a poem that might bring them five pounds from 
"the New Monthly Magazine." A friend, Mr. Cruik- 
shank, had been dreaming about a Phantom Ship. Cole- 
ridge suggested the dream as a groundwork of the poem. 
Wordsworth, who had been reading in Shelvocke's voy- 
ages the sailors' superstitions about albatrosses, suggested 
shooting an albatross as the crime that was to bring trouble 
on the Ancient Mariner, and it was he also who suggested 
the navigation of the ship by the dead men. The poem 
was written by Coleridge, Wordsworth only furnishing a 
few lines. When written, "the Rime of the Ancient 
Mariner" seemed too important to be given to a maga- 
zine. It caused the planning of a book, the "Lyrical 
Ballads," in which Coleridge was to deal chiefly with the 
supernatural world and Wordsworth with the natural. 
Each was to take the direct way to the realising of poetic 
thought, by avoidance of conventional phrases and the 
use of words chosen from the language of real life. Cole- 
ridge's friend, Joseph Cottle at Bristol, was bold enough 
to publish the book and pay the authors. When he sold 



IN THE BEIGJSr OF VICTORIA. 115 

his stock and copyrights, not long afterwards, the tender 
made for "Lyrical Ballads" was £0 Os Od. Cottle 
thoughtfull}^, therefore, took the opportunity of passing 
back the despised copyright to the authors. With X30 
paid by Cottle for Wordsworth's share of the Lyrical 
Ballads, William and Dorothy went abroad and spent 
the winter 1798-9 at Goslar near the Hartz Mountains. 
With the first breath of spring, after an unusually cold 
winter, Wordsworth felt the last ties of the old days, 
" Not mine, and such as were not made for me," to fall 
away from him. His mind stirred by an active sense of 
freedom with its "trances of thought and mountings of 
the mind," looked boldly to a life before him, all his own, 
a poet's life. 

Days of sweet leisure, taxed with patient thought 
Abstruse, nor wanting punctual service high, 
Matins and vespers of harmonious verse. 

Free to move as they pleased, the brother and sister, 
when they came back to England, went to Stockton upon 
Tees, for there lived an old companion at the Dame School 
in Penrith, Mary Hutchinson. From Stockton a walk was 
taken with Coleridge in the Lake Country. As the year 
drew to a close, and it became necessary to set up another 
independent home, Wordsworth remembered a little cot- 
tage just outside the village of Grasmere, upon the border 
of the Lake, which had been to let. He walked over to 
see whether it was still to be had, found that it was, and 
took it from the next following Christmas, 1799. So it was 
that Wordsworth and his sister began their life at Grasmere 
in the beginning of this century. There Wordsworth, 
thirty years ago, began by producing, with additions, a 



116 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

new edition in two volumes of the " Lyrical Ballads," and 
occupied leisure hours in poetic meditation on the past 
course of his life that made him what he was, and to what 
end he worked. In this long poem, addressed to Cole- 
ridge, and published by his widow after his death as " the 
Prelude," Wordsworth was feeling his way to a clear 
knowledge of his place among the poets. He married 
Mary Hutchinson in 1802, the year in which Lord Lous- 
dale died childless, and his heir, who was a clergyman's 
son, paid tlie debt to the Wordsworths, thus giving about 
X1800 each, to William and his sister Dorothy. Influence 
of his sister and of his wife, in the peace of Grasmere val- 
ley, brought calm to his spirit. While others, who had 
felt as he felt in 1789, lost all hope when the Revolution 
failed, the close of Wordsworth's " Prelude," written in 
1805 and the beginning of 1806, shows that he had gained 
a surer though a calmer hope. 

Throughout the war with Napoleon, Wordsworth illus- 
trated in a noble series of poems, grouped in his Works 
as "Poems dedicated to National Liberty and Independ- 
ence," the best mind of England combating against 
tyrannic force. In June 1803 his eldest child, his son 
John, was born. In the same year began his friendship 
with Sir George Beaumont, that lasted until Beaumont's 
death in 1827. In August 1804 his daughter Dorothy — 
Dora — was born. The son John had been named after 
Wordsworth's brother John who, at the close of 1804, 
was appointed to the command of the Abergavenny East 
Indiaman. The ship sailed with 402 passengers on board, 
and on the 5th of February 1805, through fault of the 
pilot, struck on the shambles of the Bill of Portland. Of 
all who were on board only 139 were saved. The captain 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 117 

staid by his duty on the wreck, and went down with it. 
It was to have been John Wordsworth's last voyage, from 
which he had hoped to retire with means enough to spend 
the rest of his days at Grasmere with William and Dorothy, 
who had contributed £1200 out of their shares in the little 
patrimony to advance their brother's fortunes. In June 
1806 Wordsworth's third child, Thomas, was born, and in 
September 1808 his fourth child Catherine. The family 
could no longer be housed in the cottage at Townend, 
and there was removal to another house in Grasmere, 
called Allan Bank. In May 1810 William, the fifth child, 
was born. Thomas and Catherine failed in health. In 
1811 the family removed from Allan Bank to the Old 
Grasmere Rectory, opposite the churchyard. Catherine 
was laid in the churchyard in June 1812. In the autumn 
little Thomas swept the falling leaves from his sister's 
grave, but he was laid by her side in the following Decem- 
ber. Change of home was then absolutely necessary. 
Peace of mind was unattainable by Wordsworth and his 
wife within daily sight of the churchyard in which were 
the graves of their two little ones. For this reason a 
house was sought at Bydal, about two miles distant, and 
in the spring of 1813 the family removed to Kydal Mount, 
which was thenceforth Wordsworth's permanent home. 
About the same time the second Lord Lonsdale, who in 
every way made generous amends for the wrong done by 
his predecessor to the Wordsworths, placed the poet above 
narrow care for bread by obtaining for him the post of 
distributor of stamps for Westmoreland, and afterwards 
for Cumberland also. The assured income of £500 a year 
gave Wordsworth ease, and enabled him to produce in 
1814 his " Excursion." This was one part only of a poem 



118 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

designed on a larger scale, but it was in itself a complete 
expression of what would have been the purpose of the 
whole. Through " the Excursion " Wordsworth dealt 
with the problem of our common life as it stood after 
the failure of those who had aimed at a reconstruction of 
society by Revolution. Wordsworth still maintained the 
loftiest ideal of a humanized society. He used poetically 
the characters drawn in " the Excursion " as so many fac- 
tors in working out his own solution of the problem. The 
Wanderer represents shrewd natural sense, strengthened 
in youth by homely and religious education and in man- 
hood by wide intercourse with men. The Solitary repre- 
sents one in whom faith seems dead, enthusiasm for the 
best aims of the Revolution being quelled by the apparent 
failure of the effort. Talk between Wanderer and Soli- 
tary, and all the associated incidents, maintain one flow of 
thought, until the Pastor, representing culture and religion 
in acquaintance with the daily lives of men, adds his part 
to the argument. The full course of reasoning leads to 
expression of the faith which is at the heart of Words- 
worth's poetry. It there first found distinct expression. 
It is now the faith of all who look for a full civilization. 
The question of " the Prelude," " What one is, why may 
not millions be ? " is answered in " the Excursion." The 
way to realize the far ideal is not by violent change in the 
outward form of a state, but by change in the minds of its 
citizens. The first condition of success in this citizen- 
building is that no child's mind shall be left untaught; 
and in the year before Waterloo Wordsworth in " the 
Excursion " was claiming for every child its sacred right, 
and urging on the State its duty. Now, he said, when 
destruction is a prime pursuit. 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA, 119 

" Show to the wretched nations for what end 
The powers of civil polity were given." 

The first edition of 500 copies of " the Excursion " 
lasted the English public for six years. The next edition 
of 500 it took seven years to sell. Southey heard of a 
critic who thought he had crushed " the Excursion." " He 
crush ' the Excursion ! ' " Southey said. " Tell him he 
might as well think he could crush Skiddaw." 

At the beginning of the reign of Victoria, Wordsworth 
had long since delivered his message. He published in 
1837 "Memorials of a Tour in Italy," and with them 
a poem, " Guilt and Sorrow," written in 1791. In 1838 
he was made LL.D. of Durham, in 1839 D.C.L. of Oxford. 
Southey died on the 21st of March 1843, and Wordsworth 
was then made Poet Laureate. In 1841 his daughter 
Dora married Edward Quillinan, an old friend of the 
family. In 1846 Wordsworth was elected by the students 
Rector of the University of Glasgow. His only surviving 
brother, Christopher, died in that year. In 1847 Dora 
died, and Wordsworth wrote " Our Sorrow I feel is for 
life, but God's will be done." In 1850, on the 10th of 
March he attended service at Rydal Chapel for the last 
time. In the evening he walked to Grasmere through a 
keen north-east wind, called at a cottage and sat down on 
the stone seat of the porch to watch the setting sun. He 
was eighty years old, and lightly clad. There followed, 
after a few days, a fatal inflammation of the throat and 
chest. When hope of recovery was gone, his wife whis- 
pered to him " William, you are going to Dora." He died 
on the 23d of April 1850, and was buried beside his chil- 
dren in the churchyard at Grasmere. 



120 OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE 

Robert Southey, born on the 12th of August 1774, was 
the son of a linenclraper in Bristol. His father was noted 
for his punctvial habits, a characteristic that his son inher- 
ited, but although punctuality is said to be the soul of 
business, Southey's father was unprosperous. Southey 
himself owed the chief care over his childhood and youth 
to a maiden aunt. Miss Tyler, an elder half sister of his 
mother's, and to his mother's brother the Rev. Herbert 
Hill, chaplain to the British factory at Lisbon. He was 
sent to Westminster School. In his last year at West- 
minster, in 1792, Southey contributed to a school magazine 
called "the Flagellant" a playful article on Flogging, 
tracing the practice in schools as a sacred rite associated 
with the worship of the Devil, and glancing at head mas- 
ters as high priests by whom its mysteries were maintained 
and transmitted. Dr. Vincent, the head master at West- 
minster, resented the article, and Southey was expelled. 
We have to remember the emotions of the time, the revo- 
lutionary outburst in the greater world : the sympathies, 
in school and college, of large bodies of the young with 
all attacks on tyranny; the strong feeling on the other 
side that impelled to battle for authority, and the belief 
that, then if ever, it was necessary to assert authority 
against the spirit of insubordination among those who 
were to be citizens of the future, and upon whose alle- 
giance to law the future of England might depend. Uncle 
Hill held by his nephew, who was open, generous, alive 
with eager intellect ; and as for any common sense he 
wanted, that, his uncle said, would come. At a time, 
therefore, when Southey's father, a broken man, was 
dying. Uncle Hill and Aunt Tyler proceeded to send their 
nephew to Oxford. But the offended head master had 



IK THE HEIGN OF VICTORIA. 121 

sent such an acconnt of him to the authorities at Christ 
Church that when he applied for admission there he was 
refused. He was entered to Baliol ; and at that time of his 
entrance into the University, his father died. At Oxford 
he was " citizen Southey," full of wild poetic hope for the 
regeneration of the world. At nineteen he began an epic 
poem, " Joan of Arc," and finished it in six weeks. One 
ground of interest in the theme was, tliat it represented 
high emotion and a patriotic struggle of France against 
English invasion. England then had entered into what 
Southey regarded as unholy war against the Revolution. 
Like Wordsworth, Southey gave his sympathy to the 
Girondins who took Brissot for their guide. After the 
execution of Brissot, in the autumn of 1793, Southey felt, 
as Cowper had felt, sick at heart with every day's report 
of wrong and outrage. There seemed to him no place 
left in the corrupted world for virtue. In the summer of 
1794 citizen Southey at Oxford was visited by Coleridge 
from Cambridge. The scheme of a migration to the Sus- 
quehanna was devised. Robert's mysterious plottings 
gave Aunt Tyler concern. Uncle Hill, who still hoped 
that he might guide his nephew to a quiet living in the 
English church, held that, whatever the plots, a run to 
Spain and Portugal with him when he returned to his own 
post at Lisbon, would distract the boy's attention from 
them, and would do him good. Southey was glad of the 
run, but he had engaged himself to marry Edith Fricker. 
To make all sure, he married her privately before starting, 
his friend Joseph Cottle, a sympathetic bookseller who 
believed in Southey's genius and in the genius also of his 
friend Coleridge, lending the money necessary for the 
wedding ring and marriage fees. Southey went to Spain, 



122 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

wrote to Edith letters from Spain and Portugal designed 
for publico.tion, and came back with that knowledge of 
Spanish which he increased and turned to excellent ac- 
count for literary labours of his after years. He had now 
to acknowledge his wife, to bear the withdrawal of all 
further care for him by his Aunt Tyler, and to hght the 
battle of life for himself. In 1796 " Joan of Arc " was 
published by Cottle. The " Letters from Spain and Por- 
tugal " were published also in 1797. There were changes 
of lodging, and there was constant increase in the number 
of Southey's literary friends. There came aid of <£160 a 
year from his old school fellow Charles Wynn, according, 
as they both felt, to the fashion of the good time that 
would come when 

Whate'er is wanting to yourselves 
In others ye shall promptly find, and all, 
Enriched by mutual and reflected wealth, 
Shall with one heart honour their common kind. 

In 1799 and 1800 there were published two little vol- 
umes of an "Annual Anthology," containing verses by 
Southey, Coleridge, Robert Lloyd, Charles Lamb, Hum- 
phrey Davy, then a young man of one and twenty at 
Bristol, and other contributors. Southey earned a guinea 
a week by writing verses for "the Morning Post," to 
wliich also' Wordsworth and Coleridge contributed. But 
Wordsworth had found his own path. Coleridge was not 
of punctual habits. Southey alone, looking upon such 
work as a source of income, held to it with his usual dili- 
gence. He finished " Madoc," worked at " Thalaba," and 
was planning " the Curse of Kehama " before " Thalaba " 
was finished. He paid a visit, with his wife, in 1800, to 
Uncle Hill in Portugal, who, always wise and kind, was 
still his friend. 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 123 

In 1801, when Southey returned, Coleridge was settled 
for a time at Greta Hall, Keswick, by Derwent water, 
where he was thirteen miles from Wordsworth at Gras- 
mere. Southey visited him there, but being offered the 
post of private secretary to Montagu Corry, Chancellor of 
the Exchequer for Ireland, with a salary of <£400 a year, 
he felt bound to accept it. Then, leaving his wife for a 
time at Keswick, Southey went to Dublin. He found that 
he had little to do, that little being tedious. When it was 
suggested that he should fill up his spare time by acting 
also as tutor to Mr. Corry 's son, Southey gave up the 
appointment and fell back upon the literary life that was 
for him the happiest. In 1801 he published two volumes 
of Poems, and also " Thalaba." In 1802 his mother came 
to see him in his London lodging, and died there. He 
moved to a little furnished house at Bristol and worked 
on his English version of " Amadis of Gaul," which he 
had undertaken to produce for £60. In the autumn of 
this year his first child was born, a daughter, who died in 
a few months. To comfort his wife with the companion- 
ship of her sister, Coleridge's wife, Southey went with her 
to Greta Hall, which thenceforth became their home. It 
was first shared with Coleridge ; but Coleridge, suffering 
from the damp of the lake country, soon afterwards wan- 
dered away, and the home remained Southey's, with charge 
in it for some time of Coleridge's wife and children, and 
of his wife's other sister, Robert Lovell's widow. All was 
to be maintained by steady, cheerful labour of the pen. 
In 1803 " Amadis of Gaul " appeared, and interest in the 
boy poet of his native Bristol prompting a kind heart, 
Southey edited Chatterton's poems for the benefit of Chat- 
terton's relations. 



124 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

At Greta Hall there were Coleridge's children. Hart- 
ley and Derwent were the two boys, and Sara was a baby 
of seven months when, after the loss of his own first child, 
Southey first saw her at Keswick. On May Day in 1804 
Southey again had a child of his own, a daughter, Edith 
May, and Southey wrote in 1809, " I have five children, 
three of them at home, and two under my mother's care 
in heaven." Sara Coleridge, who was bred by Southey in 
that household of cheerful love and labour, spoke of him 
as " upon the whole the best man she had ever known." 

"Madoc" was published in 1805, and also a collection 
of "Metrical Tales." Southey's profit from "Madoc," 
with which poem he had taken especial pains, was, at the 
end of a year, £3. 16s. Id. In 1807 he published an 
English version of " Palmerin of England," also " Speci- 
mens of the Later English Poets," also " Espriella's Let- 
ters," which playfully represented English manners and 
customs as they were supposed to appear to a visitor from 
Spain. Li tliis year 1807 his old school-friend Charles 
Wynn obtained for him, on account of literary services, a 
pension from the Civil List that took the place of his own 
annual allowance of <£160, and was of about that value. 
Still working the mine of Spanish literature, out of which 
he had drawn some part of the help of his housekeeping, 
Southey next produced a version of " the Chronicle of the 
Cid." Then followed, in 1810, the " Curse of Kehama " 
and a " History of Brazil." Away from libraries Southey 
needed books, and he loved their companionship. Books 
had multiplied about him from his youth upward, and the 
volumes in the library at Greta Hall grew in time, through 
purchase and gift, from four thousand to fourteen thou- 
sand. Half a dozen labours were usually being carried 



IN THE BEIGJS- OF VICTOBIA. 125 

on together at the study table ; long hours of work were 
punctually observed; refreshment was in change of the 
form of work ; and rest was everywhere outside the study 
in the cheerful home, its wise peace and its tender play- 
fulness. " There is no sense so good," he said, " as your 
honest genuine nonsense." Southey avoided excitement. 
In his mind, as in other minds, the young faith in sudden 
change had been overthrown, and while he looked still, as 
his '' Colloquies " show, and passages in his poem on the 
field of Waterloo, to a nobler day for man, he looked to 
its slow attainment by advance of a true sense of life with 
the advance of culture. Like Wordsworth he laid chief 
stress upon education of the people. The changed tone 
of his mind brought him into accord with the founders of 
" the Quarterly Review," and after its establishment, in 
1809, writing for '' the Quarterly " became one form of 
Southey 's work. In 1813 Southey was made Poet Laure- 
ate, and in 1814 he produced tlie best of his longer tales 
in verse, " Roderick, the Last of the Goths." In 1818, 
behind his yearly income, Southey had for his whole for- 
tune X400 in consols. In 1821 that sum had been in- 
creased, and he gave all to a ruined friend who had been 
good to him in former years. Yet he refused an offer of 
X2000 a year if he would come to London and write 
daily in " the Times." 

A son and daughter nad died in the happy home at 
Greta Hall ; grief for their loss was so deep seated that 
father and mother never dared again to speak their names. 
But a deeper grief followed in 1834, when, after forty 
years, during which, as he wrote to his friend Bedford, 
"she has been the life of my life," Southey's wife had to 
be placed in a lunatic asylum. Next year she was re- 



126 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUEE 

turned to him and for lier last days trusted to his care, 
but she lived only until November. He worked as hard 
as ever, and his earnings had so far increased that he was 
now making some provision for his family in case of death. 
Sir Robert Peel offered him a baronetcy. That was 
declined, but Sir Robert then added £300 a year to 
Southey's pension. 

Such was the English worthy who was poet laureate in 
1837, aged sixty-three, at the beginning of the reign of 
Queen Victoria. He had been editing Cowper's works, 
and touching upon the insanity in Cowper's life, while 
she whom he loved best was dying insane beside him. 
His gentleness of manner was even increased by his sense 
of the shades that were closing in upon his evening of life. 
His memor}^ would fail ; his old animation was gone ; his 
body had wasted; and the eagle face had lost its fire. 
Among his friends, for the last twenty years, had been 
Caroline Bowles, only child of Captain Charles Bowles of 
Buckland near Lymington, who had distinguished herself 
by verses to which her name was not attached, and which 
had excited Southey's admiration. He had expressed his 
admiration for her in ^' the Quarterly " before he knew 
her personally. At Midsummer in 1839 Southey married 
Miss Bowles, his age being then sixty-five, hers fifty-two. 
But the failure of power was not checked. Signs of decay 
became more and more manifest. Two months after his 
marriage he began to lose himself at times in conversa- 
tion. Then the use of the pen failed ; then the power of 
reading. He walked about among his books, still loving 
them, although they were dumb to him now. Wordsworth 
in 1840 visited him in his library at Greta Hall. Southey 
did not know him, until told who it was. '' Then," wrote 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 127 

Wordsworth, "his eyes flashed for a moment with their 
former brightness, but he sank into the state in which I 
had found him, patting with both hands liis books affec- 
tionately like a child." He died on the 21st of March 
1843. 

Southey's whole character is in his writings. In prose 
and verse he maintained the reaction against formalism 
by a simple purity of style, based on the simple purity 
of his own character. The only man of whom he wrote 
severely Avas Byron, and that only after Don Juan began 
to appear, because he felt that Byron made an ill use of 
his genius, and dragged minds down instead of raising 
them. 

There was health in the ideal of his own longer poetical 
romances, and although they yield few lines that cast a 
thought into imperishable form, " Thalaba " and " the 
Curse of Kehama," " Madoc " and " Roderick " are four 
of the best metrical tales in English Literature. In 
" Thalaba " and " the Curse of Kehama " there was, as in 
Scott's metrical romances, an escape from the convention 
of heroic couplets, but South ey's defiance of convention 
was as absolute as he could make it. 

" Madoc " and " Roderick " were in blank verse of 
simple dignity. In "Roderick," which might fairly be 
called an epic. Sou they 's more ambitious tale-writing rose 
to its best form. In the less ambitious work, the metrical 
tales and legends of his younger days, the grace of a 
playful good humour blends with the spirit of romance, 
and there never will be a time when they cease to furnish 
a part of the familiar literature of the English People. In 
the "Life of Nelson," published in 1813, Southey gave 
to a national theme the charm of his clear style, and in 



128 OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE 

"the Doctor," of which the first volume was published 
anonymously in 1833, and the last some years after his 
death, the whole pleasantness of Southey's character with 
his best sense of life breathes through his love of books. 

In the last days of his mental darkness, Southey was 
heard breathing to himself with satisfaction the name of 
his friend Landor — " Ay, Landor, Landor . . ." He had 
met Landor first at Bristol in 1808, and spoke of him as 
" the only man of whose praise I was ambitious, or whose 
censure would have humbled me." Walter Savage Lan- 
dor, who was about six months younger than Southey, 
lived on through a vigorous old age to the year 1864. 
He was the son of a j^hysician at Warwick, and was born 
on the oOth of January 1775. His second name of Sav- 
age was that of his mother's family. His mother owned 
the two estates in Warwickshire of Ipsley Court and 
Tachbrook, with a share of a reversionary interest in 
Hughenden Manor, in Buckinghamshire. To this prop- 
erty, worth £80,000 and strictly entailed upon her eldest 
son, Landor was heir. At ten lie was sent to Rugby, vig- 
orous, impulsive, impatient, with a quick intellect that 
fastened upon nature and upon those books of the poets 
which are the best part of nature. He soon became one 
of the best Latin scholars in Rugby and probably the 
best writer of Latin verse. It irritated him that the head 
master seemed to underrate his Avork; and when Landor 
was irritated the fire flashed, it never smouldered. A 
violent quarrel with the head master over a Latin quan- 
tity led to a request that his father would remove Landor 
from Rugby, since he would not bend his temper to school 
discipline. His sympathy with the French Revolution 
brought him into conflict of opinion at home ; but his 



IlSr THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 129 

sympathy was that of a mind with extreme bias towards 
individual freedom. He was a natural republican, and 
could not bow to the despotic monarchy of school. After 
two years with a private tutor Landor went, in 1793, to 
Oxford. He was at Trinity when Southey was at Baliol. 
But Landor's college life was brought to an abrupt end, 
}ike his life at Rugby. Being rusticated, he gave up his 
chambers and refused to go back to the University. This 
brought to a head the disputes at home, and Landor 
parted from his father. Allowance was made to him of 
£150 a year with freedom of action, and welcome to his 
father's house whenever he paid it a visit. Landor then 
went to South Wales, living at Swansea, Tenby, or else- 
where, and sometimes visiting home. In South Wales 
there was again close communion with books and nature, 
and with all his keen relish for the ancient classics he 
found in Milton the masterpoet; "even the great hex- 
ameter sounded to me tinkling when I had recited aloud, 
in my solitary walks on the seashore, the haughty appeal 
of Satan and the repentance of Eve." Near Tenby he 
had friends in the family of Lord Aylmer. Rose Aylmer 
lent him a " History of Romance " by Clara Reeve, in 
which he found the sketch of a tale that suggested to him 
his poem of " Gebir." Landor began " Gebir " in Latin, 
but then turned to English, and when all was done he 
vigorously condensed what he had written. " Gebir " 
was published anonymously at Warwick, as a pamphlet, 
in 1798, the year of the " Lyrical Ballads." Robert 
Southey was among the few who bought it, and he first 
made known its power. In the best sense of the phrase 
" Gebir " was written in classical English, not with a 
search for pompous words of Latin origin to give false 



130 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

dignity to style, but with strict endeavour to form terse 
English lines of apt words well compacted. Many pas- 
sages appear to have been half thought out in Greek or 
Latin, and Landor published a translation of " Gebir " 
into Latin three or four years after its first appearance. 
The poem included prophetic visions in which Landor's 
sympathy with the French Revolution and his contempt 
for George IIL were duly figured. At the close of 1805 
Landor's father died, and the young poet became a man 
of property. He lived chiefly at Bath. 

In 1808 Southey and Landor met. Their friendship 
remained unbroken. No later differences of political or 
other opinion could touch the delight of each in the free 
powers of his friend. When Spain rose to throw off the 
yoke of Napoleon, Landor's enthusiasm carried him to 
Corunna, where he paid for the equipment of a thousand 
volunteers and joined with them the Spanish army of the 
North. After the convention of Cintra he returned to 
England, sharing the disappointment that was expressed 
by Wordsworth in a vigorous prose pamphlet. Then Lan- 
dor desired a large Welsh estate, Llanthony Priory, and 
paid for it by not only selling an estate in Staffordshire 
inherited from his father, but also by divesting himself of 
part of the inheritance that would come to him at his 
mother's death. He began at Llanthony costly improve- 
ments, but still lived much at Bath, where in 1811 he 
married, in quick accordance with a sudden fancy, at the 
age of thirty-six a girl of twenty. Then he began his 
tragedy of " Count Julian." The patriotic struggle in 
Spain had caused Southey, Scott and Landor all to deal 
with the romance of Count Julian who, to avenge wrong 
done on his daughter by Roderick, the last of the Gothic 



JiV THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 131 

Kings, called in the Moors. Southey's epic of "• Roderick, 
the last of the Goths," and Landor's play of Count Julian 
had botli been begun in 1810, and the friends worked in 
fellowship. Landor was also writing Latin Idyls. His 
play of '' Count Julian " was published in 1812. His 
"Idyllia" he published at Oxford in 1813. After five 
years, his impetuous temper had surrounded him with 
troubles at Llanthony, in which place he had sunk seventy 
thousand pounds. In 1814 Llanthony was vested in trus- 
tees, other property was sold, and Landor left England, 
parting abruptly from his wife because she was unwilling 
to live in France. But reconciliation followed on that 
quarrel ; for a time Mr. and Mrs. Landor lived at Tours, 
and then for three years at Como, where a son was born 
to them. A quarrel with a magistrate obliged Landor to 
leave Como. He was then chiefly at Pisa from 1819 until 
1821, and at Pisa he published his Latin poems as " Idyllia 
Heroica," with an Essay De cultu atque usu Latini ser- 
monis. In 1821, Italy then sharing in active expression 
of the revived spirit of nationality, Landor addressed to 
the Italian people an Italian essay on Representative Gov- 
ernment. After Pisa, Florence was Landor's home, and 
there, or in the immediate neighbourhood, he lived for the 
next eight years. There he worked at his "Imaginary 
Conversations," of which two volumes were published in 
1824. The dialogues, between speakers of many lands 
and many ages of the world, were developed through a 
vigorous prose, compact with thought, expressing in force 
and grace and combative opinion an individuality that 
was even the fresher for carrying with it everywhere, like 
Milton's prose, the scholarship and the sincerity that gave 
precision to the style. Landor's sentences, often Cicero- 



132 OF ENGLISH LITEEATUBE 

nian, mark strongly the difference between strained rheto- 
ric set forth in Latin English, and vigorous thought in 
English phrase with a style based on scholarly attention 
to the best prose of the Latins. The whole mind of Lan- 
dor found expression in these dialogues, which closed with 
a poem on the national uprisings in Greece and Italy. Li 
1826 a second edition appeared, with an added third vol- 
ume in 1828. Twenty-seven more dialogues followed as 
a new series in 1829. More dialogues were written, but 
not published until 1846. Before Florence was left, Lan- 
dor had a family of four children. His " Imaginary Con- 
versations " gave him literary fame, and brought new 
friends who were fascinated by the charm of kindly gen- 
ius under the headstrong impulsive character. His fiercest 
wrath, when it had way, would end usually in explosions 
of laughter. No man's compliments were more delicate 
than Landor's, and his bluff sincerity gave them unusual 
value. It was at Florence that Lady Blessington made 
his acquaintance. He acquired at once a foremost place 
among her many friends. 

Margaret Power, Countess of Blessington, was born in 
1790, the daughter of an Irish squire in the county of 
Waterford. She had beauty, vivacity, and natural refine- 
ment; but was most unhappily married before she was 
fifteen to an English officer, a Captain Farmer. After his 
death, she married, in 1818, an Irish peer, the Earl of 
Blessington, with whom her life became luxurious and 
easy. They spent some years in Italy, which yielded to 
Lady Blessington matter for books. Her " Conversations 
with Lord Byron," were published in 1832. She wrote 
also "The Idler in Italy" and "The Idler in France." 
After Lord Blessington's death, in 1829, Lady Blessington 



IJSr THE BEIGK OF VICTORIA. 133 

settled at Gore House, Kensington. For the remaining 
twenty years of her life, her house was a fashionable 
centre of intellectual enjoyment. There she was at home 
in 1837, forty-eight years old, at the beginning of the 
reign of Victoria. She wrote novels, she edited fashiona- 
ble annuals, " the Book of Beauty," and " the Keepsake," 
and she and Count D'Orsay had a pleasant welcome to 
her social circle for all the talents. Count Alfred D'Orsay, 
nine years younger than Lady Blessington, was the son of 
a general D'Orsay, and was in the French army till he 
attached himself to Lord and Lady Blessington. In 1827 
he married Lord Blessington's daughter by a former mar- 
riage, but soon separated from her. In 1829 he returned 
with Lady Blessington to England and was looked upon 
as one of the leaders of the fashionable world. Count 
D'Orsay had some skill in drawing and sculpture and artis- 
tic tastes. When Landor at Florence made the acquaint- 
ance of Lord and Lady Blessington, the Count was their 
companion. 

In 1829, when Lady Blessington settled at Gore House, 
Landor bought, with help of money lent by a Welsh ad- 
mirer, a villa at Fiesole, the Villa Gherardesca. Boccaccio's 
Valley of Ladies was within its grounds. There, with an 
occasional stormy outbreak and litigation about water- 
rights that would have delighted Mr. Tulliver, he was 
happy, and his children were his playfellows. At Fiesole 
he prepared a revised collection of his poems, which was 
published by Edward Moxon in 1831, " Gebir, Count 
Julian, and other Poems." In 1832 Landor revisited 
England, but he returned next year to Fiesole. In 1834 
Lady Blessington superintended for him the anonymous 
publication of his " Citation and Examination of William 



134 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

Shakespeare." Lanclor joined with it a dialogue between 
Essex and Spenser after Spenser had been driven from 
Kilcohiian. Another of Landor's books written at Fiesole 
was his " Pericles and Aspasia," in two volumes of letters. 
The publishing of these was managed for him by his 
friend and sometime neighbour at Fiesole, the novelist 
George Payne Rainsford James, who had published his 
first novel, " Richelieu," in 1825, when he was twenty-four 
years old, and when Walter Scott, by whose historical 
novels he was moved to imitation, was still writing. In 
1835 Landor, happy in his children but not in his wife, 
had his home at Fiesole broken up by domestic feud. 
Not enduring his wife's speech to him in presence of his 
children, he parted from his family and, after a few months 
by himself at Lucca, came to England. He remained in 
affectionate correspondence with his children, and did not 
quarrel with his wife's relations. He went for a time 
from place to place in England before settling again, and 
then, at the beginning of the reign of Victoria, in October 
1837, being nearly 63 years old, he returned to Bath. In 
the same year he published his Imaginary Conversations 
between Petrarch and Boccaccio, supposed to have been 
held on five successive days, which he called "the Pen- 
tameron," adding to the book five various dramatic scenes, 
" Pentalogia." When in London, Landor was happiest as 
guest at Gore House, where at the crowded assemblies he 
came to know men of the rising generation, and where, 
among others, he first found his friend John Forster, after- 
wards his Avarmhearted biographer, and Charles Dickens, 
who transferred one or two of his outward peculiarities to 
Mr. Boy thorn in Bleak House. 



IN TUE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 135 



CHAPTER V. 

JOURNALISTS OF THE ELDER GENERATION, ESSAYISTS 
AND POETS. 

We turn now to a group of men who passed as elders 
into the reign of Victoria, which owed much to them for 
the quickening of intellectual discussion. Francis Jeffrey 
and SjTlney Smith, John Wilson and Thomas De Quincey, 
forefathers of the modern race of quarterly and monthly 
journalists. 

Francis Jeffrey was born in Edinburgh in 1773. At 
the Edinburgh High School he was under Mr. Eraser, 
who afterwards boasted that from three successive classes, 
of four years each, he turned out Scott, Jeffrey and 
Brougham. He remembered Jeffrey as "a little clever 
anxious boy, always near the top of the class, and who 
never lost a place without shedding tears." There were 
120 boys taught in the class, under one master, without 
help of an usher. In 1787 Jeffrey was sent to Glasgow 
University, which he left for a session at Oxford. There 
he took pains to get rid of his Scottish accent, and, said 
Lord Holland, at nineteen he had lost the broad Scotch 
but gained only the narrow English. From Oxford he 
returned to Edinburgh, in 1792, and studied law. Having 
joined the debating society of the University, the Specu- 
lative Society, which had been founded nearly thirty years 
before, he read five papers in it and was much influenced 



136 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

by its young energies. In 1794 he was called to the Scot- 
tish bar, and hoped for practice. 

On the first of November 1801 Jeffrey married a second 
cousin, Catherine Wilson, daughter of the Professor of 
Church History at St. Andrews. His profession up to 
that time had never brought him in £100 a year. He 
and his wife set up their home on the third story of No. 
18 Buccleuch Place. He furnished his study for <£7. 18, 
his dining room for <£13. 8, and his drawing room for 
<£22. 19. In that establishment " the Edinburgh Review " 
was born. It was the happiest of homes, to which of 
evenings came quick witted friends, apt for " plain living 
and high thinking." One of them was Sydney Smith, 
who happened then to be preacher at the episcopal chapel 
in Edinburgh. Sydney Smith was born in 1771 at Wood- 
ford in Essex, and had his education at Winchester School 
and New College Oxford, where he obtained a fellowship. 
He took orders and began his ministry in 1794 as curate 
at Nether Avon in Wiltshire, not very far from Stone- 
henge. Mr. Hicks Beach was Squire of the parish, and 
Sydney Smith himself afterwards, before a collection of 
his own essays from the " Edinburgh Review," told briefly 
what followed. "When first I went into the church I 
had a curacy in the middle of Salisbury Plain. The 
Squire of the parish took a fancy to me, and after I had 
served it two years, he engaged me as tutor to his eldest 
son, and it was arranged that I and his son should pro- 
ceed to the University of Weimar. Before reaching our 
destination, Germany was disturbed by war, and in stress 
of politics we put into Edinburgh, where I remained five 
years. The principles of the French Revolution were 
then fully afloat, and it is impossible to conceive a more 



JN THE EEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 137 

violent and agitated state of society. Among the first 
persons with whom I became acquainted were Lord Jef- 
frey, Lord Murray (late Lord Advocate for Scotland) and 
Lord Brougham ; all of them maintaining opinions upon 
political subjects a little too liberal for the dynasty of 
Dundas, then exercising supreme political power over the 
northern division of the island. One day we happened 
to meet in the eighth or ninth story or flat" (playful 
exaggeration of the third) "in Buccleuch Place, the 
elevated residence of the then Mr. Jeffrey. I proposed 
that we should set up a ' Review ; ' this was acceded to 
with acclamation. I was appointed editor, and remained 
long enough in Edinburgh to edit the first number of the 
' Edinburgh Review.' " The first direct suggestion of a 
Review may have come from Sydney Smith, but the first 
number or two had no sole editor; the projectors man- 
aged it among them. There had been an " Edinburgh 
Review " of which the first number appeared in January 
1755, the second and last number in January 1756. No. 
1 of that Review had included a slight notice by Adam 
Smith of Johnson's Dictionary. The desire of the found- 
ers of the new Review was to deal with politics as well as 
literature, and to wage energetic war against all wrongs 
for which they sought the remedies. No. 1 appeared on 
the 10th of October 1802. It contained seven articles by 
Sydney Smith, four by Leonard Horner and five by Jef- 
frey. Four have been ascribed to Brougham, but it is 
doubtful whether Brougham was among the very first 
who wrote. When he did presently join in the work, he 
was one of the most active writers, equal to the produc- 
tion of a whole number by himself, if need were. The 
first three numbers were given to Archibald Constable, 



138 OF ENGLISH LITERATUBE 

the publisher, who pledged himself to take the risk of pro- 
ducing four. While the freshness and courage of the 
new Review, the wit and wisdom applied in it to foremost 
questions of the day, were spreading its fame to London, 
Jeffrey himself was in his usual or natural state of what 
Lord Cockburn calls "a lively argumentative despair." 
Jeffrey himself once wrote to Malthus, " I am very much 
in a state of despair, while I have scarcely any actual 
anxiety." While Constable was being asked by Jeffrey 
whether he could venture to print a fourth number, Syd- 
ney Smith was telling him that he must maintain and 
advance the success of the Review by paying £10 a sheet 
to the writers in it. As the success grew rapidly, the 
payment was raised to X16 a sheet as minimum, but two 
thirds of the writing was paid for at a higher rate. The 
average rate of payment for a sheet under Jeffrey's 
editorship was twenty or twenty-five guineas. 

When the first number of "the Edinburgh Review" 
was on the point of appearing Jeffrey had a son born, in 
September 1802, who died in a few weeks. His under- 
lying tenderness of character made the memory of this 
loss ever afterwards a cause of nervous anxiety about 
children's complaints in the households of his friends. 
Jeffrey's wife died in August 1805, when he was rising at 
the bar, and as its first editor, carrying on the Review to 
high success. He acquired his wide influence by nervous 
energy in the pursuit of worthy aims, by skill with the 
pen, judgment in politics, tact in relation with other men. 
His tact was due to a temper essentially kind and sensi- 
tive, while there was honest freedom everywhere in 
expression of opinion. His quick sensibility gave him a 
rare power of transforming face and voice, in playful mim- 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 189 

icry. If he did not like the work of his best friend, and 
had to review it, he could not review dishonestly. He 
was not a man of genius, and his judgments in literature 
have not stood the test of time. His censures were 
emphatic, although there the working of his gentleness 
of character not seldom crumbled away some of his con- 
demnation before all was said. None, however, would 
have inferred from the tone of the reviewer that, off 
paper, he was one of the kindest and most sensitive of 
men. As he rose at the bar in Edinburgh, after vain 
endeavours to satisfy society with the set of his wig over 
black bushy hair, he pleaded without his wig, and was for 
fifteen or twenty years almost alone in doing so. In 1829 
he became acknowledged leader of the Scottish bar, and 
was made Dean of the Faculty. With other office in 
view, he then resigned his office of Editor of " the Edin- 
burgh Review." In 1830 he was made Lord Advocate 
and entered Parliament. After the Reform Bill he was 
the first member for Edinburgh. But in the parliamen- 
tary conflict he was not at ease. His health also had 
failed, and he gave up political ambition. In 1834 he 
became a Scotch judge, and was known thenceforth, by 
the title due in Scotland to his office, as Lord Jeffrey. 
That was his position at the accession of Queen Victoria. 
He was among the veterans of Literature, honoured for 
what he was, not living upon the reputation of the past, 
until his death in January 1850. When Jeffrey, its first 
editor, resigned his charge over " the Edinburgh Review," 
in 1829, his successor was Macvey Napier, one of the 
principal clerks of the Court of Session at Edinburgh 
and Professor of Conveyancing in the University. He 
had shown his literary skill and powers of work by super- 



140 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

intending a new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 
He was editor of "the Edinburgh Review" from 1829 
during the rest of his life. But he died, before Jeffrey, 
in 1847. 

In the first years of " the Edinburgh Review " Walter 
Scott was among Jeffrey's friends, and he also was a con- 
tributor, for intellectual sympathies were stronger than 
any differences of political opinion. Scott was then pub- 
lishing his Border Minstrelsy, and editing Thomas of 
Erceldoune. Like Jeffrey he practised in the law courts 
and loved literature. In 1805 Scott's genius flashed out 
in " the Lay of the Last Minstrel," and he suddenly at- 
tained wide fame. But when Scott's " Marmion " ap- 
peared, his friend Jeffrey did not like it, thought it 
unpatriotic, and found fault with it in "the Edinburgh 
Review." When the criticism appeared, Jeffrey sent it to 
Scott with a generous and honest little note. Scott did 
not abate in cordiality towards Jeffrey, but showed very 
distinctly that he had lost goodwill towards the Review. 
He fancied that he had been among the writers for it upon 
the understanding that their papers would be rather 
literary than political, imagined they had broken faith 
with him, and ceased to contribute. At that time the 
founder of the publishing house of Murray was a young 
man with a small shop in Fleet Street and unbounded 
energies. John Murray desired a share in the profit and 
credit of publishing the works of the new favourite, Walter 
Scott. He made advances, at last found his way to Edin- 
burgh, and heard Scott's grumbling at a dinner table over 
the Whig Review, at a time when Jeffrey's grumbling at 
" Marmion " was fresh in his mind. Murray leapt at once 
to the conception of a Review on the other side to match 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA, 141 

the Edinburgh, with Scott himself promptly engaged for 
a contributor. In that way " the Quarterly Review " came 
into life. The first conception passed rapidly on to birth 
of the new journal, of which No. 1 appeared in February, 
1809. — Its first editor was William Gifford, a man humbly 
born, who owed his rise to friends won by his conspicuous 
abilities. He had proved himself a keen satirist and a 
good English scholar, and he seemed to John Murray and 
the promoters of his new Review the right man to com- 
pete as editor with Francis Jeffrey. 

Gifford died in 1826. His successor in charge of " the 
Quarterly " was John Gibson Lockhart, who was its editor 
from 1825 to 1853. Lockhart's age was only forty-tAVO at 
the beginning of the reign of Victoria. He was born in 
1793, studied at Glasgow where his father was minister of 
the College Church, and after three years at the Glasgow 
University won a Bursary that enabled him to continue 
his studies at Baliol College, Oxford. He left Oxford for 
Edinburgh, read there for the Scottish bar, and was called 
in 1816. In the following year his keen relish for litera- 
ture brought him into active fellowship with John Wilson 
and the men who were in that year founding the fortunes 
of " Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine." He was then a 
young man of four and twenty, thin, eager, skilful in cari- 
cature with pen and pencil, and with an outward manner 
that seemed cold and supercilious. For his gift of stinging, 
he was figured by his comrades as the Scorpion, but they 
and other of Lockhart's intimate friends found good reason 
to like him heartily. In 1820 he married the eldest daugh- 
ter of Sir Walter Scott. In 1823 he published a volume 
of Spanish Ballads, translated into English verse with a 
poetic vigour that has caused good Spanish scholars to 



142 OF ENGLISH LTTEBAtURE 

doubt wlietlier tliey may not be better than the originals. 
He published also four good novels, "Valerius," in 1821, 
"Adam Blair," in 1822, "Reginald Dalton," in 1823, and 
" Matthew Wald," in 1824. In 1828 he published a " Life 
of Burns." When Sir Walter Scott died in 1832 he left 
his son-in-law sole literary executor, and at the beginning 
of the reign of Victoria, John Gibson Lockhart was pro- 
ducing the seven volumes of his full and elaborate " Life 
of Scott." 

John Wilson, foremost of the group of men busy in 
1817 over the establishment of Blackwood's Magazine, was 
about eight years older than Lockhart. Like his friend 
Thomas De Quincey he earned his place in literature as a 
journalist, and the points of likeness and difference be- 
tween these two friends make it convenient to speak of 
them together. They were born in the same year 1785, 
John Wilson, the son of a gauze manufacturer at Paisley, 
Thomas De Quincey, son of a Manchester merchant. 
John Wilson was educated chiefly at a school kept in 
the manse of the neighbouring parish of Mearns. His 
teacher did not check the love of outdoor life and nature 
that brightened his work in afterlife. If the pupil shut 
up his Greek and said, " I should like to go fishing," the 
teacher said, " Go, fish." When twelve years old, Wilson 
left Mearns for the Glasgow University. His father had 
died, leaving him .£50,000. He was at Glasgow for six 
years, in Professor Jardine's family, and was eighteen 
years old when he entered as a gentleman commoner at 
Magdalene College, Oxford. He was at Oxford for the 
next three years and a half. At twenty-one he was one 
of the athletes of the University. He had a broad chest, 
much red-brown hair, enormous whiskers, his height was 



IN THE B^IGN OF VICTORIA. 143 

five foot eleven, and he was the best man at a long jump 
in all England, doing twenty-three feet on a dead level. 
Once, when insulted in the street as he came from a din- 
ner-party in a London square, he knocked down his assail- 
ant and, to avoid question over a street row, proceeded as 
he was to Oxford, and reached his college gate as it was 
being opened in the morning. His studies, like his pleas- 
ures, were fastened upon heartily. He graduated, and 
in 1807, settled at Elleray by Windermere, aged twenty- 
two, with ample means and vigorous of mind and body. 
Thomas De Quincey was the fifth of six children of a 
Manchester merchant who died of consumption at the age 
of 39, leaving to his widow and family X 30,000 and a 
house near Manchester at Greenhays. This son Thomas 
was precocious and sensitive. He was educated at home 
and at the Bath Grammar School. At fifteen he was 
eager to go to Oxford, but it was felt that his share of the 
patrimony hardly yielded enough to meet University ex- 
penses without aid from an exhibition, which could cer- 
tainly be earned at the Manchester Grammar School if he 
went there for three years.. He went most unwillingly. He 
worked hard in his own way, and before he left school his 
master said of him to a friend, " That boy could harangue 
an Athenian mob better than you or I could address 
an English one." But it was an abiding grievance to him 
that an enthusiastic head master continued his lessons 
into the time left for exercise between school and dinner. 
This, he said, disordered his liver, and when they gave 
him a dose of medicine that he described as "a tie:er 
drench," his cup of wrath was full. He borrowed five 
pounds and ran away to Chester ; wandered into Wales ; 
found his way to London. There in his utter poverty and 



144 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

solitude he had divers adventures, and first felt the en- 
joyment of a dose of opium, given to him at a chemist's 
shop in Oxford Street, to relieve rheumatic pains of the 
head and face. He was at last found and recovered. In 
October 1803 he went to Oxford, where his name was on 
the books of Worcester College until 1808. But he 
studied in his OAvn way, sought neither University honours 
nor College friends. Even his tutor he kejjt at a distance, 
confining intercourse between them to the matter of their 
studies. De Quincey began at Oxford his habit of taking 
opium as a means of intellectual excitement. The depres- 
sion following the exaltation invites to another dose. The 
body, dried and enfeebled by the action of the drug, calls 
for increased doses; opium being one of the drugs of 
which what is called a tolerance becomes established, so 
that doses can sometimes be gradually increased until the 
daily allowance becomes more than would suffice for poi- 
soning a score of people. In the year before he left Ox- 
ford, De Quincey made the acquaintance of Coleridge, 
Wordsworth and Southey, and when he was free to choose 
his dwelling-place, he chose, in the winter of 1808, the 
little cottage at Grasmere in which Wordsworth began 
housekeeping at the Lakes, and which had then been left 
by Wordsworth for Allan Bank. Wordsworth's old cottage 
— it was called Dove Cottage because it had once been 
a little inn called the Dove and Olive Branch — was De 
Quincey 's home from 1808 till 1829, and he continued to 
rent it until 1836. Here, by the year 1813, his use of 
opium had grown into a daily habit. In 1816 he was 
taking eight thousand drops a day of laudanum ; eight 
thousand drops are within very little of a pint. But when 
he married, in that year, 1816, he reduced his allowance 
to a thousand drops. 



IJSr THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 145 

John Wilson was in those days De Quincey's nearest 
friend. He had first found him in Wordsworth's study 
"in a sailor's dress, manifestly in robust health, and wear- 
ing upon his countenance a powerful expression of ardour 
and animated intelligence, mixed with much good nature." 
De Quincey and Wilson both loved the poets, looked up 
with reverence to Wordsworth, and in their unlike bodies 
had eager minds. So Wilson strode over the hills Avith 
De Quincey trotting by his side, and the friendship lasted. 
In 1811 John Wilson married, and early in 1812 published 
his poem of " the Isle of Palms " that helped to pay for 
his wedding trip. The " Isle of Palms " shows action 
upon the young poet's mind of the two influences of Scott 
and Wordsworth, and has its plot formed on suggestion of 
those problems of civilization that were common in litera- 
ture at the turn of the century, and of which Kotzebue's 
" La Perouse " is an example. Children were born, and 
John Wilson was enjoying life by Windermere ; with boats, 
a little fleet of his own, upon the lake ; with vigorous 
enjoyment of his strength of limb ; and, as one of his 
poems shows, his inner life stirred to the depths in 
nightlong mountain-w^alks beneath the stars. Then came 
to him the most fortunate event of his life. In 1815, at 
the age of thirty, he lost all his money by the failure of 
an uncle in whose hands its management was placed. 
John Wilson made no complaint, but he gave up his idler 
enjoyment and buckled to work. He left Elleray with 
his family, and was for a time under strict discipline in 
his mother's patriarchal household at 53 Queen Street. 
He was called to the bar a year before John Gibson Lock- 
hart. He published in 1816 a dramatic poem, " the City 
of the Plague," and was ready to thrive by Law or Litera- 



146 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUEE 

tiire, when there came the opportunity for which he had 
not long to wait. In December 1816 William Blackwood, 
the publisher, entertained the proposals of two gentlemen, 
fierce James Cleghorn, known as the editor of a Farmer's 
Magazine, and mild Thomas Pringle, a writer and poet, 
who afterwards visited South Africa. They suggested the 
want of a new Tory monthly magazine for Edinburgh, to 
supersede " the Scots Magazine " which was Whig and 
had become feeble. " The Edinburgh Monthly Magazine " 
appeared, therefore, in April 1817, under the management 
of its projectors. After the second number editors and 
publishers were at feud. In June the publisher advertised 
that at the end of three months from that date the Maga- 
zine would be discontinued. The editors were then per- 
suaded to take .£125 for their share in the copyright, and 
the seventh number, first of a new series, appeared with 
its name altered to " Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine," 
the publisher keeping in his own hands all privileges of 
editor, and looking about for vigorous articles from the 
cleverest young Tories he could find. The first number 
of " Blackwood " was alive with dashing personality. It 
attacked Coleridge and Leigh Hunt, and it gave a history 
of itself in the form of a " Translation from an Ancient 
Chaldee MS.," in which it parodied the style of the 
Book of Revelation. Mr. Blackwood of 17 Princes Street 
was a man clothed in plain apparel who stood in the door 
of his house, and his name was as it had been the colour 
of ebony, and there came up to him two great beasts — 
the former editors, " the one beast was like unto a lamb, 
and the other like unto a bear." When Blackwood called 
other friends to his help the " two beasts " went over to 
Constable, " a man who was crafty in counsel," publisher 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 147 

of the Edinburgh Review, and edited his " Scots Maga- 
zine." Blackwood took heart and was encouraged by his 
friends, but perplexed by multitude of advisers, until the 
veiled editor appeared and summoned his instruments. 
The first was John Wilson, who is thus described : " And 
the first which came was after the likeness of the beautiful 
leopard, from the valley of the palm-trees, whose going 
forth was comely as the greyhound, and his eyes as the 
lightning of fiery flame." Lockhart was thus figured: 
" There came also, from a far country, the scorpion, which 
delighteth to sting the faces of men, that he might sting 
sorely the countenance of the man which is crafty and of 
the two beasts." This whimsical piece, representing the 
beginning of the war of Whigs and Tories from the camps 
of Constable and Blackwood, included about forty sketches 
of leading Edinburgh men in verses that shocked many a 
reader as irreverent caricatures of the phraseology of the 
Apocalypse. John Wilson was the leading spirit in the 
magazine. By the end of 1819, its prosperity enabled 
him with his wife and five children to set up a home of 
his own, and in the next year, when he was 35 years old, 
though he knew nothing of the subject he proposed to 
teach, he was set up, on the Tory side, as candidate for 
the vacant chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of 
Edinburgh. Though his opponent was Sir William Hamil- 
ton, he was elected by a Tory Town Council, and at his 
first lecture conquered a hostile throng of students by the 
simple manliness with which he set about his work. He 
had studied hard during the vacation and prepared his 
course. Thenceforth, as Professor Wilson, his frank kind- 
liness made him a power over the hearts of the young. 
As '' Christopher North," his wit and humour, his poetic 



148 OF ENGLISH LITERATUEE 

sense of nature, his heartiness not only in hard hitting 
but in generosity where he saw need, not only in the 
"Noctes Ambrosianse" — Nights at Ambrose's Tavern 
— but in papers of all kinds, gave to the pages of 
Blackwood health and vigour. He died in April 1854. 
He was ill in 1852 when Macaulay was rejected at Edin- 
burgh, and rose from a sick-bed to vote for him, Whig as 
he was, because he was ashamed of the cry raised against 
a worthy man of letters. 

De Quincey who had published the " Confessions of an 
English Opium Eater," in 1821, in "the London Maga- 
zine," lived chiefly by journalism. He wrote about fifty 
papers in '' Blackwood," left Grasmere in 1829, was drawn 
to Edinburgh by the friendship of John Wilson, and in 
1843 settled at the cottage Scott once had occupied at 
Lasswade near Edinburgh. He died in 1859. His col- 
lected magazine papers constitute his works in 14 volumes. 

John Foster, who was born in the year of Wordsworth's 
birth, 1770, and died in 1843, the year of Southey's death, 
was essayist of another kind. He was of Yorkshire family, 
educated at Bristol at the Baptist College, and thenceforth 
a preacher. He is remembered for his thoughtful essays 
" on Decision of Character " and other subjects that direct- 
ly concern the building up of citizens. His Essay "on 
tlie Evils of Popular Ignorance," striking the same note, 
allied his thoughtful teaching to the work of men who 
were labouring for the advance of education. 

James Montgomery, a year younger than Wordsworth, 
was born at Irvine in Ayrshire, in November 1771. He 
was the son of a Moravian Missionary, who left him at a 
Moravian school in Yorkshire to be educated while he 
went to preach to the negro slaves in the West Indies. 



IN THE EEIGN OF VICTORIA. 149 

Montgomery never again saw father or mother. They 
died in the West Indies. The boy was placed by the 
brotherhood in a general shop kept by a Moravian at 
Mirfield. He was a verse smitten boy, and as his verses 
multiplied his literary ambition rose, and he set off to 
walk to London in search of a publisher. On the way he 
was obliged to halt, and take a situation in another general 
shop. At last the youth and his poems reached London 
and a publisher was found. He did not want the poems, 
but offered Montgomery a place as shopman. Montgomery 
was glad to accept it, and from this position transferred 
his services in 1792 to a Mr. Gales in Sheffield, a book- 
seller, who had set up a newspaper, " the Sheffield Regis- 
ter." Montgomery managed the printing of this, and also 
wrote in it. The times were astir with revolutionary 
hope ; the English government, in dread lest fire should 
spread from France to England, was seeking to put down 
the expression of distasteful opinions, Mr. Gales had to 
leave England to escape government prosecution. His 
assistant, James Montgomery, continued the paper; with 
a significant change of its name to the symbol of hope, he 
called it " the Sheffield Iris." He was prosecuted, fined 
and imprisoned for a song on the Fall of the Bastille and 
an account given in the " Iris " of a riot at Sheffield. 
But after his release he went on with his paper, and pub- 
lished verses written in prison as " Prison Amusements." 
Thenceforth James Montgomery, as journalist and poet, 
was a leader of thought in Sheffield, with an influence 
extending over England. His enthusiasm for the better 
life of man on earth was associated with a deep religious 
feeling. His volumes of poems "the Ocean," in 1805, 
"the Wanderer in Switzerland," in 1806, "the West 



150 OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE 

Indies," in 1809, "the World before the Flood," in 1812, 
though he was attacked in the "Edinburgh Review," 
deserved the reputation they still hold. In 1819 followed 
" Greenland," a poem in five cantos, in 1828 " The Pelican 
Island," and in 1836, the year before the accession of 
Victoria, there was a collected edition of his Poems in 
three volumes. A volume of Original Hymns, published 
in 1846, was added by him to the literature of the present 
reign. Sir Robert Peel made the poet's latter years easier 
by a pension of £150, and he died on the 30th of April, 
1854. 

Thomas Campbell, who in the last year of the eigh- 
teenth century sang "the Pleasures of Hope," was six 
years younger than James Montgomery, but the elder 
man outlived the younger by ten years. Thomas Camp- 
bell, led by his first great success to become a working 
man of letters, had produced occasional volumes of poetry 
finished with the utmost care. " Gertrude of Wyoming " 
and other poems appeared in 1809; " Theodric " with other 
poems in 1824, and there was a new edition of his poetical 
works in 1828, when the copyrights had all reverted to 
him. But while he thus cared for his place among the 
poets he was earning by hurried task work, much of it 
done as editor of magazines. He edited for some time 
" the New Monthly." In 1819 he was producing his seven 
volumes of " Specimens of the British Poets," with critical 
essays. Charles James Fox obtained for him a pension of 
£200 a year. In 1826 he was honoured by election to 
the dignity of Rector of his old University, Glasgow. 
At the same time he became a leader among those who 
were engaged in the foundation of the London University. 
In those days the honours of the English Universities 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 151 

were denied to dissenters, and all public school education 
in England held by the old tradition that associated it 
entirely with the established form of the Church in which 
it had its origin. The dissenters proposed a University 
in London for themselves. Brougham would have followed 
their lead, but Campbell urged, against many difficulties, 
the nobler conception of a London University tied to no 
party and no sect, but offering to all the highest culture, 
and his view prevailed. Li 1828, when Campbell had a 
pleasure of hope fulfilled by the opening of the building 
designed for the London University, he lost his wife, and 
at the end of the year he was honoured by election for 
the third time to the Lord Rectorship of the University 
of Glasgow. At the end of 1830 Campbell had ceased to 
edit "the New Monthly," of which he said, "it was im- 
possible to continue editor without interminable scrapes, 
together with a law-suit now and then." The editorship 
had added <£600 a year to a limited and encumbered 
income. Campbell meant to escape from slavery, write 
at his own will and live content upon a little. But when 
he broke from his old relations a heavy balance against 
him made itself felt, and he was compelled to fall back 
upon other hackwork, and knew many troubles. Stirred 
by the taking of Warsaw in 1831, he helped with money, 
ill to be spared, and with a manly sympathy. By the 
Poles themselves he was declared in their journals to be 
the man in England to whom they owed most gratitude. 
He then set on foot the formation of " the Polish Asso- 
ciation," and was enabled by the generosity of his rich 
brother poet Samuel Rogers to pay £500 for a third share 
in the proprietorship of a magazine, " the Metropolitan," 
that he was editing. Discovering in good time that the 



152 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

share was worth less than nothing, he with difficulty got 
the money back, and repaid it to Rogers. He set to work 
then on the Life of Mrs. Siddons, which was published in 
1834 ; but did not cease to edit " the Metropolitan," which 
came soon afterwards into the possession of Captain Mar- 
ryat, a kindly friend. Campbell at this time was practising 
in lodgings a close economy, and paid off in three years 
£900 of debt. After the publication of the Life of Mrs. 
Siddons, in 1834, he took a trip to Paris and was tempted 
to run farther south to Algiers. He started with close 
and doubtful calculations about payment of the costs of 
travel, but news of a legacy came to relieve his doubts, 
and he returned to London with his weak health strength- 
ened. Then he made a book of his experiences, " Letters 
from the South," published in 1837. Thus at the age of 
sixty he was continuing his life into the reign of Queen 
Victoria. 

During the first two years of the reign Campbell was 
steadily working in chambers, at 61 Lincoln's Lm Fields, 
upon his " Life of Petrarch." He planned also an edition 
of his poems for the people, which was published by Ed- 
ward Moxon in 1839, printed in double-columns and at 
the price of two shillings. He was at work also on a new 
poem, "The Pilgrim of Glencoe," published, with other 
poems then first collected, in 1842. In 1840 the sense of 
solitude of chambers had driven Campbell to take a house 
in Pimlico, and establish himself in it with a niece, whom 
he had educated, for his housekeeper. This was his last 
home in England. " The Pilgrim of Glencoe " was coldly 
received. Campbell had relied on profit from it. He had 
cashed expectancies, and felt that the costs of his new 
house would be beyond his means. Health and vigour 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTOEIA. 153 

were failing. The sale of his collected poems fell away, 
and, while waiting until he could get rid of his house, he 
was planning a subscription edition of his poems. But 
the author of " the Pleasures of Memory," always a good 
friend to the author of " the Pleasures of Hope," brought 
Campbell into relations with Edward Moxon, the poet's 
publisher. Edward Moxon published a volume of Sonnets 
of his own, and if they are not immortal they were signs 
of a love for the poets that affected pleasantly his business 
relations with them. Here also the publisher made gen- 
erous arrangements that relieved the poet of much care. 
Edward Moxon was one of the few friends who crossed 
to Boulogne to take leave of the poet when he lay there 
dying. He died on the 15th of June 1844. 

Thus far the press of forward battle had been urged in 
their youth by those of whom the youngest combatant was 
sixty years old in 1837. After the accession of Victoria 
they still joined in the strife on which it had become the 
part of other men to spend the fresh force of their lives. 
As they fell, men of the next generation pressed into their 
places. 



154 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



CHAPTER VI. 

OF WOMEN WHO WEOTE IN THE EAKLY PART OF THE 

EEIGN. 

Joanna Baillie and Miss Edge worth were the veter- 
ans of literature who represented in 1837 the woman's part 
in the work of civilization. Eldest among the younger 
women was Barbara Holland, born in 1770, of like age 
therefore with Wordsworth. Frances Trollope was then 
59 ; Lucy Aikin, bQ ; Lady Morgan, 54 ; Mary Somerville, 
45 ; Mary Howitt, 37 ; Harriet Martineau and Letitia 
Elizabeth Landon, otherwise unlike, were alike in being 
35 years old ; Anna Maria Hall was 33 ; Caroline Eliza- 
beth Norton, 29, and Elizabeth Barrett, afterwards Mrs. 
Browning, who has earned the first rank among English 
poetesses, was also twenty-nine. There was also Lady 
Charlotte Elizabeth Guest, afterwards Lady Charlotte 
Schreiber, who in the year 1838, at the age of about five 
and twenty, enriched English Literature with a transla- 
tion of old Welsh Romances from a MS. in the Library of 
Jesus College, Oxford, — the Llyfr Coch o Hergest, the 
Red Book of Hergest, — as "the Mabinogion," stories for 
the young, " mab " being Welsh for a child. From one of 
the tales in this collection, " Geraint, the Son of Erbin," 
Tennyson framed his poem of " Geraint and Enid." 

Lady Morgan, born in 1783 as Sydney Owenson, the 
daughter of an Irish songwriter, acquired reputation in 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 155 

1806 by her third novel "the Wild Irish Girl" and then 
became, as a writer of light literature, active and popular, 
expressing liberal opinions. In 1811 she married Sir 
Charles Morgan, a physician with literary tastes. She 
died in 1859, and in the early years of the reign of Vic- 
toria, like Lady Blessington, she folded in her drawing- 
room at evening a little flock of authors. Her Memoirs 
were published after her death. 

Mary Somerville was the first to shake man's comforta- 
ble faith in the incapacity of women for scientific thought. 
She was the daughter of Vice Admiral Fairfax, was born 
at Jedburgh in 1792, and was sent to a school at Mussel- 
burgh. She had a natural taste for the study of mathe- 
matics, which was quickened by association with the studies 
of a young seaman whom she married early in life, Captain 
Greig. She married afterwards a cousin. Dr. Somerville. 
In 1826 Mrs. Somerville had presented a memoir to the 
Eoyal Society on the magnetising power of the more 
refrangible solar rays. In 1831 she produced an English 
paraphrase of Laplace's "Mechanism of the Heavens," 
begun at the suggestion of Lord Brougham for instruc- 
tion of the people. If it had not outgrown the required 
limits it would have been issued as one of the cheap vol- 
umes of the " Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowl- 
edge." In a book, wholly her own, on "the Connexion 
of the Physical Sciences " first published in 1834, and re- 
published in many editions, Mrs. Somerville applied exact 
knowledge to a broad generalization that should help men 
to draw from the outer world some sense of the harmonies 
of the universe. Her "Physical Geography" belongs to 
the reign of Victoria. It was published in 1848, and its 
aim, like that of the preceding work, was to enlarge 



156 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

culture, in this case by widening the sense of those great 
operations of nature which immediately affect the condi- 
tions of the life of man. Mrs. Somerville's clearness of ex- 
pression and habitual breadth of view gave a charm to her 
books that made them for many years a powerful aid to 
the advance of knowledge into wisdom. In her later life 
Mrs. Somerville settled in Italy, and she died at Naples in 
November, 1872. 

Lucy Aikin was probably drawn into literature by the 
examples of her aunt, Mrs. Barbauld, and her father Dr. 
John Aikin, a physician who made literature his business. 
Dr. Aikin edited a magazine, took part in editing a bio- 
graphical dictionary, and devised a popular book for the 
young, called " Evenings at Home." His daughter Lucy 
began to write for magazines when she was seventeen, 
and obtained credit in 1818 for the first of her books of 
Historical Memoirs, " Memoirs of the Court of Queen 
Elizabeth." She continued the series with '^ Memoirs 
of the Court of James I." in 1822, the year of her father's 
death, and published in the following year a memoir of her 
father. She then settled at Hampstead, and lived chiefly 
there until her death, having Joanna Baillie until 1851 for 
friend and neighbour. In 1825 her father's sister, Mrs. 
Barbauld, died. She had been born Anna Lsetitia Aikin, 
and Lucy Aikin published her works with a memoir. In 
1833 the series of Historical Memoirs was continued with 
" Memoirs of the Court of Charles I." The Life of Addi- 
son in 1843 and a volume of Holiday Stories in 1858 were 
the only books published by Lucy Aikin in the reign of 
Victoria. She died in January 1865. 

Mrs. Hofland had died in 1844 at the age of 74. Hers 
also had been a literary life of modest usefulness. As 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 157 

Barbara Wreaks, of Sheffield, she had married and become 
Mrs. Hoole. In two years she was a widow, and had to 
support herself. She published some poems in 1805, and 
set up a school at Harrogate. In 1808 she married the 
landscape painter, Thomas Christopher Hofland, and her 
pen was companion to his brush in the support of home. 
In 1813 she published a story for young readers, called 
" The Son of a Genius," that was very widely popular. 
Afterwards came novels and tales, including a character- 
istic series of stories in one volume designed for the pleas- 
ure of young girls, who were also to draw from them some 
aid to a wholesome moral training. They were often 
named after the qualities they recommended, " Decision," 
" Patience," " Fortitude," " Energy." More elaborate 
novels had been written by Mrs. Opie, also a painter's 
wife with the same openly didactic purpose, "Temper" 
was one of them published in 1812; Mary Brunton had 
published "Self Control," in 1811, and followed with 
"Discipline," in 1814; in 1823 "Lying in all its Branches" 
was another of Mrs. Opie's books, and in 1828 there was 
" Detraction displayed." Mrs. Opie was only a year older 
than Mrs. Hofland, and outlived her, for she died in 1853, 
but she did not continue to write after 1837. Jane Porter, 
who, with her sister Anna Maria, had been active and 
popular as novelist in the early years of the century, also 
survived until 1850, but she did not write under Victoria. 
Even Harriet Lee, who was born in 1756, and with her 
sister Sophia produced popular short stories, as "Canter- 
bury Tales," between the year 1797 and 1805, was living, 
though not writing, under Victoria, and died at the age 
of 95 in 1851. Mrs. Hemans had died in 1835, closing a 
sad life at the age of forty-one. Her Poetical Remains were 



158 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

published in 1836 with a short memoir. Two volumes of 
Memorials of her were also published in the same year 
by Mr. H. F. Chorley. The strain of sentiment in Mrs. 
Hemans's verse was associated with domestic feeling ; the 
sad undertone was a real note of life in her. In Lsetitia 
Elizabeth Landon, admired by readers of Keepsakes and 
Poetical Albums as L. E. L., the sentiment was more con- 
ventional, though harmless and graceful of its kind. In 
1821, when she was but a girl of nineteen, and Byron was 
still living, she published the "Fate of Adelaide," and from 
that time her occasional verses in Magazines and Annuals 
were supported by occasional books of verse, " the Impro- 
visatrice" in 1824, the year of Byron's death, "the Trou- 
badour " in 1825, " the Venetian Bracelet " in 1829, each 
with a little following of "other Poems," and the "Lay 
of the Peacock" in 1835. Miss Landon produced three 
Novels in the reign of William IV., and in 1837 published 
" Traits and Trials of Early Life." Her mind was acquiring 
health and strength when she married, in June 1838, the 
Governor of Cape Coast Castle, Mr. George Maclean. She 
went out with her husband to Cape Coast Castle and died 
there within four months of her wedding day. 

A tendency to artificial sentiment was certainly not the 
fault of Mrs. Frances Trollope as a novelist. There was 
a practical heartiness in her work that gave pleasure to 
the readers of her own generation, and her name lives 
for the next generation of readers also in two sons who 
maintain its credit. Frances was the wife of Thomas 
Adolphus Trollope, a barrister, to whom she was married 
at the age of nineteen, and by whom she was left widow 
at the age of thirty-five, with a family to support. Her 
son Thomas Adolphus was then fifteen years old and her 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 159 

I 
son Anthony ten. She sent both sons to Winchester 
School, the elder also to Oxford, and the younger also to 
Harrow. In 1829 she went to America, staid three 
years, and published in 1832 her experience of the '' Do- 
mestic Life of the Americans," to the great discontent 
of those whose manners she described. Then followed 
light and cheerful records of Travel in Belgium and 
Western Germany and a book on " Paris and the Paris- 
ians," before Mrs. TroUope began novel writing, in 1837, 
with "Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw," followed promptly 
by "the Vicar of WrexhilL" In 1838 Mrs. Trollope in 
"the Widow Barnaby" produced a picture of a vulgar 
woman on her travels, drawn with a rough good humour 
that pleased many readers. Following the lead of Charles 
Dickens, who, by his Oliver Twist, had, in 1838, quick- 
ened attention to the working of the Poor Laws, Mrs. 
Trollope published in 1839, in monthly parts, a novel 
upon life in the Factory, " Michael Armstrong, the Fac- 
tory Boy ; " she also continued the adventures of her 
Widow Barnaby in "the Widow Married," and published 
a book on " a Visit to Italy." Another novel, " Jessie 
Phillips " followed, and, in 1843, " the Barnabys in Amer- 
ica." From this time until 1856 Mrs. TroUope's novels 
appeared in rapid succession with an occasional light book 
founded on travel. Sometimes, as in "the Robertses on 
their Travels " (1846) travel and fiction were united in 
one work. Her last novel, " Gertrude," a^Dpeared in the 
year 1855. In that year her son Anthony Trollope pub- 
lished his first novel, "the Warden," which obtained 
immediate and permanent reputation. In the following 
year Mrs. Trollope published her last book, "Paris and 
London," and her elder son, Thomas Adolphus Trollope, 



160 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

published his first book, "the Girlhood of Catherine de' 
Medici." Then the brave, hardworking mother, who by 
her skill in furnishing wholesome entertainment to the 
public had secured all aids of liberal training for her 
children, and achieved her best success in their successes, 
put her pen aside. Its work was done. Mrs. TroUope 
spent her last years in Florence and died in October 
1863. 

Mary Howitt and Anna Maria Hall had skill as writers 
of healthy stories for the young ; so had Miss Martineau, 
although her energies went out over a wider field of 
labour. Mrs. Howitt and Mrs. S. C. Hall had also the 
happiness of long lives spent in fellowship of labour with 
their husbands. William and Mary Howitt made, as far 
as possible, their labours one. They were both members 
of the Society of Friends, he born at Heanor in Derb}'- 
shire in 1795, she, as Mary Botham, at Uttoxeter in 1804. 
They married in 1823, and published in that year "The 
Forest Minstrel" with their names joined on the title- 
page. In 1827 they produced another joint-work, " The 
Desolation of Eyam and other Poems." It was after the 
accession of Victoria that Mary Howitt applied the sense 
of poetry that was stronger in her than in her husband, 
to the skilful invention of story books for the young, 
beginning with " Strive and Thrive " in 1839. The titles 
of the next tales will suggest their spirit: "Hope on, 
Hope ever; " " Sowing and Reaping ; " " Little Coin much 
Care." William Howitt had published in 1833 a "His- 
tory of Priestcraft," and in 1837 "the Rural Life of Eng- 
land." They went to live for a time at Heidelberg in 
1841. The result was that William Howitt published a 
book on "Student Life in Germany," with translations 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 161 

of German students' songs, find Mrs. Howitt, who im- 
proved the time by also learning Swedish, became a most 
graceful and pleasant translator into English of the novels 
of Fredrika Bremer. Husband and wife worked together 
on an account of Scandinavian Literature, and in 1862 a 
book describing '' the Ruined Abbeys and Castles of Eng- 
land " was by them both. William Howitt laboured 
steadily as man of letters for the wellbeing of the people. 
In 1846 he was connected with a " People's Journal." 
He turned to useful account in books two years experi- 
ence in Australia, whither he went in 1852 and whence 
he returned in 1854. He wrote an " Illustrated History 
of England" in six volumes, completed in 1861. The 
eldest daughter of William and Mary Howitt, trained as 
an artist, is known also as author of a pleasant book pub- 
lished hi 1853, "the Art-Student in Munich." William 
Howitt died in March 1879. 

Anna Maria Fielding, of Wexford, born in 1804, was 
married at the age of twenty to Samuel Carter Hall, a 
son of Colonel Robert Hall of Topsham, Devon. He 
was three j^ears older than his wife, and was then already 
a man of letters. He reported for a newspaper ; in the 
3'ear after his marriage he edited an annual. It was he 
who succeeded Campbell in 1830 as editor of "the New 
Monthly," and two years after the beginning of the reign 
of Victoria he founded, in 1839, " the Art Journal," which 
not only diffused information and criticism upon all mat- 
ters that concerned the advance of the Fine Arts as a 
means of culture, but by giving every month steel-plate 
engravings from good pictures and statues, together with 
many woodcut illustrations, brought the arts themselves 
into the home. Mrs. Hall began her career as a writer 



162 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

in 1828 with " Sketches of Irish Character." These were 
followed by novels, short tales, " Stories of the Irish Peas- 
antry," which first appeared in " Chambers's Edinburgh 
Journal," and stories for children, besides books written 
in fellowship with her husband. Mr. and Mrs. Hall, who 
lived to celebrate their golden wedding-day, are said to 
have written three hundred and fort}^ volumes. What- 
ever the number may be, health is in them all. And here 
also the finer grace of invention and expression is in the 
wife's share of the work. 

A third pair of workers who were active at the begin- 
ning of the reign, and who passed on to old age happy in 
their fellowship of work, were Charles and Mary Cowden 
Clarke. Mary Novello, eldest daughter of Vincent No- 
vello, and sister to the famous singer Clara Novello, was 
born in 1809. She was married at the age of nineteen to 
Charles Cowden Clarke, who had known Keats as a boy 
in his father's school at Enfield. He shared her love for 
the poets, above all for Shakespeare. In 1845 Mrs. Cow- 
den Clarke published " A Concordance to Shakespeare," 
which remained for many years without a rival, and has 
at last been rivalled only in Germany by the Shakespeare 
Lexicon of Dr. Alexander Schmidt. Mrs. Cowden Clarke 
joined her husband in producing an edition of the Works 
of Shakespeare. She has written also many poems and 
tales. In March 1877, after some years of residence 
together at Genoa, she was parted from the companion of 
all her labour, who then died at the age of ninety. But 
still active, Mrs. Cowden Clarke, even in 1881 is dating 
from her home in Genoa a book of verses, " Honey from 
the Weed," a very human book whatever its technical 
faults, pathetic with memories, womanly and true. 



IN THE BEIGN OF YICTOBIA. 163 

Among foremost representatives of English thought 
under Victoria we still have example of this happy union 
of the intellectual with the domestic life. The best Eng- 
lish poetess of her own or any time became the wife of 
one of the best English poets, when Elizabeth Barrett 
married Robert Browning. Miss Barrett was born in 
Herefordshire in 1809, the daughter of an English country 
gentleman whose kindly encouragement of her genius is 
recorded in her earliest verses. The impulse to write was 
strong in her youth, and at the age of seventeen she pub- 
lished, in 1826, " an Essay on Mind and other Poems." 
Her friend Miss Milford described her as " a slight delicate 
figure with a shower of dark curls falling on each side of 
a most expressive face, large tender eyes, richly fringed 
by dark eyelashes, and a smile like a sunbeam." In 1833 
Miss Barrett published other poems together with a trans- 
lation of the Prometheus Bound of ^schylus, which indi- 
cated the extent to which she had been refining her mind 
by Greek studies. In her as in other writers of our day 
the effect of fresher life in literature shows itself by happy 
change from a dead worship of Vergil and Horace, that 
came in with the French critical influence, to a living 
sympathy with the genius of ancient Greece in all its 
forms. Poets who feel most deeply the spirit of their time 
find their way in through beauty of external form to the 
whole soul that was in the utterance of the Greek Poets, 
and of Plato who was poet too. Not seldom also from 
poets of less mark, who connect only a few surface emo- 
tions with expression of the outward sense of beauty, 
English comes with a touch refined by contact with the 
Greeks. Miss Barrett felt the whole charm of the imagina- 
tive literature of the Greeks, and read also the works of 



164 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the Greek fathers of the Church. At the beginning of the 
reign of Victoria, there were serious signs of consumption, 
for which she was sent to Torquay. A year or two later, 
a brother was drowned by the upsetting of a boat within 
her sight, close to the shore. She was removed by easy 
stages to London, where she still studied assiduously and 
recovered health. In 1840 Miss Barrett published " the 
Seraphim and other Poems," and in 1844 there was a 
collected edition of her Poems in five volumes. Robert 
Browning had then been publishing plays and lyrics in 
occasional cheap shilling parts under the general title of 
"Bells and Pomegranates." A little piece by Miss Barrett 
in which she expressed her admiration of Mr. Browning's 
poetry by comparing it to the Pomegranate fruit, began a 
friendship that led, in 1846, to marriage. It is, therefore, 
as Elizabeth Barrett Browning that Miss Barrett lives in 
English Literature. 

Caroline Elizabeth Norton, whose maiden name was 
Sheridan, was granddaughter of Richard Brinsley Sheri- 
dan, the author of the School for Scandal. She was born 
in 1808. Her marriage at the age of twenty with the 
Hon. George C. Norton, brother of Lord Grantley, was 
not happy, and was followed after sometime by a separa- 
tion. With quick wit as a family birthright, and w^arm 
feeling, she wrote in annuals and published poems ; pro- 
duced in 1829 " the Sorrows of Rosalie ; " in 1830 " the 
Undying One " on the subject of the Wandering Jew ; in 
1845 " the Child of the Islands." She showed interest in 
several forms of political and social reform. Her novels 
were " Stuart of Dunleath" in 1851, "Lost and Saved" in 
1863, and " Old Sir Douglas " in 1868. Her best poem 
was " the Lady of La Garaye " published in 1862. 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 166 

Harriett Martineau, the sixth of eight children, was 
born at Norwich in June 1802. She was an elder sister 
of James Martineau, who was born in April 1805, and who 
has taken an important place among leaders of thought 
under Victoria. The founder of the family in England 
Avas driven from France by the Revocation of the Edict of 
Nantes, and became a surgeon at Norwich. From him 
the practice of medicine was handed down as a family 
profession to Miss Martineau's uncle, who was eminent as 
a provincial surgeon. Miss Martineau's bent for literature 
showed itself early. Before she was twenty, she published 
a book of "Devotional Exercises for the Young," and 
soon became well known as a writer of tales. In 1832 
she began to aid great social movements of the time by 
endeavours to show political principles in action through 
a series of short stories. Her " Illustrations of Political 
Economy " written upon this plan, extended through eigh- 
teen small and cheap volumes. In 1833 she illustrated in 
like manner "Poor Laws and Paupers," and in 1834 
"Illustration of Taxation" followed. 



166 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 



CHAPTER VII. 

OF THOSE BY WHOM CHEAP LITERATURE WAS MADE USE- 
FUL ; AND OF THE EARLIER LIFE OF THOMAS BABING- 
TON MACAULAY. 

Deferring what has to be said of Miss Martineau's 
work in the reign of Victoria, we turn now to some who 
were fellow-workers with her in her efforts to spread 
knowledge among the people. Such efforts acquired fresh 
energy at the time when there was, by the Reform Bill, 
an extension of the rights of citizenship. 

Charles Knight was born at Windsor in 1791. His 
mother died before he was two years old. His father, 
also a Charles Knight, was a bookseller and printer. He 
had published for the Eton boys in 1786-7 an Eton maga- 
zine, " the Microcosm " to which George Canning and 
others were contributors. 

As a boy Charles Knight read mnch ; at twelve he was 
sent for two years to a school at Ealing ; and at fourteen 
he was bound apprentice to his father. For the next 
three years he was at his case, learning to print. His 
father sold second hand books, and young Charles Knight, 
when he was not printing, made catalogues. He was 
about seventeen when he made a catalogue of the books 
of a clergyman who was selling his library before going to 
India. Among the books was a very defective copy of 
the first folio of Shakespeare, and young Charles Knight's 



II{ THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 167 

employer had in those days no reason to be conscious of 
extravagant generosity when he said of his first folio 
*' Young man, I give you that imperfect copy of Shake- 
speare for yourself." From this gift Charles Kniglit dated 
liis enthusiasm for Shakespeare. He supplied the missing 
pages of the volume, by earing fly leaves out of the seven- 
teenth century folios in his father's shop and printing on 
them with old type that happened to be in his father's 
printing office and was exactly like the type of the 1623 
folio of Shakespeare. This kind of work was his first 
training to close observation of the differences between 
earlier and later texts. In 1808 John and Leigh Hunt 
had set up "the Examiner" newspaper, which blended 
good literature in itself and the appreciation of it in 
others with a keen interest in political and social prog- 
ress. Charles Knight was among the first admirers of 
"the Examiner." In 1812 he had for two months a little 
half amateur experience as a reporter in London. This 
was designed as preparation for a venture to which he 
had persuaded his father. They were to produce out of 
their Windsor printing office an "Eton and Windsor 
Express," of which No. 1 appeared on the 1st of August 
1812. Charles Knight's account of this enterprise illus- 
trates the difficulty of producing a provincial newspaper, 
when it was burdened with a fourpenny stamp duty upon 
every copy, a duty of three shillings, raised afterwards to 
three and sixpence, upon every advertisement, and when 
the duty upon the paper used for printing was threepence 
a pound. The price of a newspaper was then usually 
sevenpence, and there were not more than a hundred 
country newspapers in all England. They could not 
easily get copies of the London papers in time for the 



168 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

prompt reproduction of important news. The chief Lon- 
don daily journals had expresses to bring news from the 
outports. One or two, especially "the Times," had pri- 
vate packet boats to meet homeward bound ships, and 
speed home before them with the news they brought. 
But foreign news that came after midnight, or a late 
sitting of Parliament, would sometimes make it impossible 
to get a London paper out till noon. The largest number 
of copies then printed by a London daily paper did not 
exceed four thousand. " The Times " first appeared on 
the 13th of January 1785, as "the Daily Universal Regis- 
ter." On the 1st of January 1788 its name was changed 
to "the Times." Li 1814 it made the first attempt at 
printing by machinery. The compositors Avho had dreaded 
what was coming, and were preparing to protect what 
they supposed to be their interests, were waiting for 
foreign news when they were told by the manager, John 
Walter, son of the John Walter by whom the paper had 
been founded, that the morning's paper had been printed 
already by steam. The men were warned that if they 
attempted violence, there was force at hand to repress it; 
if they were quiet, those men who were no longer wanted 
would have their wages paid until they found other em- 
ployment. It hardly needs to be said that one result of 
this development of the printing press has been to open 
new fields of employment and enlarge the old fields, add- 
ing greatly to the earning power of the people. The 
stamp duty on newspapers was 2^d, in 1814, and the 
advertisement duty Sd. hi 1815 the stamp duty was 
raised to M., and the advertisement duty to 3s. 6d. At 
that time the whole number of newspapers published in 
the United Kingdom, was only 254. The stamp duty 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 169 

remained at fourpence until 1836, when it Avas reduced to 
a penny, and remained a penny till its abolition in June 
1855. The duty upon each advertisement remained 3s. 
6d. until 1833 when it was reduced to Is. 6d. in Eno^land 
and Is. in Ireland. It Avas wholly abolished in 1853. 

We return now to Charles Knight, busy upon his 
" Windsor and Eton Express." He printed a play called 
"Arminius," in 1813, and published in 1816 a masque 
"the Bridal of the Isles" upon the marriage of the Prin- 
cess Charlotte. In 1817 he shewed his interest in Litera- 
ture by printing at Windsor Fairfax's version of Tasso's 
"Jerusalem Delivered," preceded by short biographies of 
Tasso and Fairfax. In 1820 he began to publish a 
monthly serial called " the Plain Englishman," with the 
direct purpose of opposing cheap and wholesome litera- 
ture to the cheap and unwholesome, which was easier to 
find. He and a friend edited the Plain Englishman for 
three years, and when it came to an end, in December 
1822, Charles Knight was in London editing a paper called 
"the Guardian." In 1823, having sold the Guardian, he 
attained one object of ambition and became a London 
Publisher. His shop was in Pall Mall East, then a quar- 
ter being built upon, in the neighbourhood of the Royal 
Mews which once occupied the site of what is now Traf- 
algar Square. He had published in 1820-21 at Windsor 
" the Etonian " for Winthrop Mackworth Praed, and other 
Eton boys who followed in the steps of J. Smith, Frere 
and Canning. In 1823 Praed was at Cambridge, and sug- 
gested to his old Windsor publisher, fresh in his dignity 
as head of a London house, that he should produce for the 
larger public a Magazine written by himself and other 
young Cambridge men. The suggestion was adopted. 



170 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUEE 

The chief writers were Praed, who signed himself either 
Peregrine Courtney or Vyvyan Joyeuse ; Thomas Babing- 
ton Macanlay, who styled himself Tristram Merton ; John 
Moultrie, who signed as Gerard Montgomery; Derwent 
Coleridge ; Henry Nelson Coleridge ; William Sidney 
Walker ; and Henry Maiden. A magazine that brought 
such men as these together in their youth belongs to liter- 
ary history. It was called "Knight's Quarterly Maga- 
zine," the first number appeared in June 1823 and John 
Wilson, — Christopher North — described it in his "Noctes 
Ambrosianse " as a " gentlemanly Miscellany, got together 
by a clan of young scholars, who look upon the world 
with a cheerful eye, and all its on-goings with a spirit of 
hopeful kindness." We shall find no pleasanter occasion 
for a glance at the chief members of the clan. 

Praed himself, William Mackworth Praed, was the 
youngest son of a serjeant-at-law, who had a country seat 
at Teignmouth. He was born in London in 1802, lost his 
mother early, and after education at a private school fol- 
lowed his eldest brother to Eton in 1814. It was just before 
passing from Eton to Cambridge that Praed and his friend 
Walter Blunt edited " the Etonian," its monthly numbers 
beginning with October 1820 and ending with July 1821. 
Praed commenced residence at Trinity College in October 
1821. He obtained medals for Greek Odes and Epigrams 
and one for English verse ; was private tutor to a noble- 
man's son at Eton from 1825 to 1827 when he obtained a 
Fellowship at Trinity, then joined an Inn of Court, and 
was called to the bar in 1829. In 1830 he felt deeply 
the death of an elder sister. He was in Parliament from 
November 1830 until after the passing of the Reform Bill, 
and again in 1834, when he held office as Secretary to the 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 171 

Board of Control under Sir Robert Peel. In 1835 his 
father died and in the same year he married. At the 
beginning of the reign of Victoria he was failing rapidly 
in health and in July 1839 he died of consumption. In 
1864 his collected poems were published in two volumes 
and with a Memoir by the Rev. Derwent Coleridge. The 
grace of his light playfulness as a writer of vers de sociSte 
is sustained in these volumes by an undertone of deep and 
pure domestic feeling. 

John Moultrie was born on the last day of the year 
1799. His grandfather had been the loyal Governor of 
Florida in the American War of Independence. His 
father was a rector in Shropshire who sent him to Eton 
and Trinity College Cambridge. At school and College 
he was comrade with Praed. In 1825 he took orders, was 
presented to the rectory of Rugby, and married the sister 
of a man, James Fergusson, who produced in 1865-67 the 
most important History of Architecture in our language. 
John Moultrie remained at Rugby to the end of his life. 
His mother formed part of his household until 1867, when 
she died at the age of ninety-three. His wife had died 
three years before. He himself died at the age of 75 on 
the day after Christmas day in 1874. 

William Sidney Walker born at Pembroke in 1795, 
published part of a poem on " Gustavus Vasa " in 1813 
before he had left Eton. He obtained a Fellowship of 
Trinity, and when the date of that had expired his life 
was troubled, until his death at the age of 51 on the 
15th of October 1846. In 1852 his Poetical Remains were 
edited Avith a Memoir by his friend Moultrie. In 1854 a 
little book by him upon Shakespeare's Versification was 
published, and in 1860 appeared three volumes of notes 
by him upon the Text of Shakespeare. 



172 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Derwent and Henry Nelson Coleridge, also among the 
contributors to ' Knight's Quarterly Magazine," were son 
and nephew of the poet. Derwent, born in 1800, was at 
St. John's College Cambridge when Praed was at Trinity. 
He entered the Church, was Principal of St. Mark's Col- 
lege, Chelsea, from 1841 to 1864, and was afterwards rec- 
tor of Hauwell and Prebendary of St. Paul's. He edited 
the Poetical Remains of his elder brother Hartley in 1851. 
He also wrote the Memoir of Praed prefixed to the col- 
lection of his works. 

The father of Thomas Babington Macaulay was Zach- 
ary, one of twelve children of the Rev. John Macaulay, 
who was during the last fifteen years of his life minister at 
Cardross. Mr. Thomas Babington, owner of Rothley Tem- 
ple in Leicestershire, married Jean Macaulay, another of 
the twelve. Zachary Macaulay was in his earlier life over- 
seer of an estate in Jamaica, where he saw what was meant 
by negro slavery. At twenty-four he gave up his position, 
and was sent to Sierra Leone by the Company formed, 
with Wilberforce a member of the Council, to oppose to 
slave labour the work done by a colony of liberated slaves. 
Zachary Macaulay, established at Freetown, became Gov- 
ernor for the Company, and worked against all difficulties 
witii a firmness and patience founded upon deep religious 
faith. An attack of fever caused him to return to Eng- 
land, where he became engaged to a Bristol Quakeress, 
Selina Mills, who had been a pupil and remained a closely 
attached friend of Hannah More and her sisters. But he 
returned to Sierra Leone, and did not marry until he was 
again in England and settled at home with a salary of five 
hundred a year as Secretary to the Company. Married 
in August 1799, Mr. and Mrs. Zachary Macaulay took a 



IN TUE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 173 

small house in Lambeth ; but when a child was to be 
born, Zachary Macaulay's sister Jean, Mrs. Thomas Bab- 
ington, invited her sister-in-law to Rothley Temple. So 
it happened that the child was born at Rothley Temple, 
on the 25th of October, 1800, and was named Thomas 
Babington Macaulay. Home was for the first two years 
of the child's life in a house in Birchin Lane, used for the 
officers of the Sierra Leone Company. For the rest of 
the time of his childhood, Macaulay's home was at a house 
in High Street Clapliam. When he was three years old, 
books became his companions. He had a marvellous mem- 
ory and soon began to talk like print. When he was 
four 3^ears old, the hostess condoled with him at a house 
where hot coffee had been spilt over his legs, and he 
replied " Thank you, madam, the agony is abated." At 
seven years old he took it into his head to fill a quire of 
paper with a Compendium of Universal History. Scott's 
" Lay of the Last Minstrel " he knew by heart. He had 
picked it up in a house at which his father made a long 
call, read eagerly, and when he went home sat down on 
his mother's bed and repeated as many cantos as she liked 
to hear. He knew also nearly the whole of " Marmion," 
when he began at eight years old to imitate Scott's verse 
with a poem on the Battle of Cheviot. When he had 
written three or four hundred lines of that, his fancy 
changed and he began a heroic poem " Olaus the Great, 
or the Conquest of Mona." At seven years old he was 
left for a week with Hannah More and her sisters at 
Barley Wood, where, as Macaulay afterwards said, " They 
could not make enough of me. They taught me to cook ; 
and I was to preach, and they got people in from the 
fields, and I stood on a chair, and preached sermons. 



174 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

I might have been indicted for holding a conventicle." 
The fluency of talk, and fluency in the outpourings of 
verse and prose cleverly imitative of the books over which 
it was his delight to hang, belonged to a frank self-con- 
fident nature, that was at the same time good-humoured 
and j)layful. Zachary Macaulay joined a nephew in estab- 
lishing the firm of Macaulay and Babington, which had a 
large business as African merchants. When the eldest son 
was thirteen, there was a family of nine children, four 
boys and five girls, in a thriving household. From a Clap- 
ham school, Macaulay was sent to Little Shelford near 
Cambridge, where he was placed, at the age of twelve, as 
one of a dozen boys under an Evangelical clergyman in 
whom his father trusted. Among his school fellows next 
year was Henry Maiden. His tutor had then removed to 
another house in Hertfordshire. The lifelong friendship 
between Macaulay and Maiden who were competitors at 
School and College, was due, as friendship often is, to like- 
ness in essentials with much outward difference. Henry 
Maiden became one of the finest scholars of his time, and 
as Professor of Greek at University College London from 
1831 until 1876, only a year before his death, he exercised 
great influence over two generations of students. He was 
among the young writers of " Knight's Quarterly Maga- 
zine," but in after years his fastidious taste restrained his 
pen. Macaulay even among school boys was loud and 
confident as a talker, and when afterwards he wrote books 
had as good an opinion of them as the kindest of his 
critics. A memory to which everything seemed to stick 
enabled him to pour out of his mind at will whatever had 
once come into it, and he took natural pleasure in the exer- 
cise of power. But it was natural pleasure. A quick wit 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA, 175 

went with tlie quick memory, and Macaulay was in all 
things so frank and kindly, that his self-confidence offended 
none. Henry Maiden's quiet nature felt, no doubt, the 
charm of Macaulay 's boldness, though in him that sense 
of an unattainable perfection which is keen in minds of 
finest temper was a restraining influence through life. He 
published nothing but a Lecture on "the Origin of Uni- 
versities" in 1835. 

Macaulay's memory was such a gift as few would wel- 
come. At thirteen he read two pieces of poor verse in 
a Cambridge newspaper while waiting at an inn, and 
forty years afterwards he could repeat them word for 
word. In October 1818 he went to Trinity College Cam- 
bridge, sharing rooms with the eldest son of his father's 
friend and fellow-worker Henry Thornton, member for 
Lambeth. At Cambridge he twice gained the Chancel- 
lor's medal for English verse. In 1821 he obtained a 
Craven University Scholarship with Maiden and George 
Long. In 1822 his neglect of Mathematics deprived the 
brilliant student of a place in the Tripos, but he suc- 
ceeded in a competition for a prize of ten pounds annu- 
ally offered to the Junior Bachelor of Trinity College 
who shall write the best Essay on the Conduct and Char- 
acter of William the Third. This brings us to the time 
when, in 1823, Macaulay, twenty-three years old, was 
among the contributors to Knight's Quarterly Magazine. 
In the following year, 1824, he and his friend Maiden 
both obtained Fellowships at Trinity. When Macaulay 
went to College, his father had made a fortune in the 
African trade ; before he left College, his father had lost 
his fortune. But the eldest son brought cheer into the 
new home in Great Ormond Street. He talked politics 



176 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

at breakfast to the delight of his father, and with his 
brothers and sisters of an evening was full of loving play- 
fulness. 

To the first number of " Knight's Quarterly " Macaulay 
contributed his Fragments of a Roman Tale, also a satire 
upon the scheme of patronage embodied in the Royal 
Society of Literature and, to please his father, an article 
on West Indian Slavery. But his father was shocked by 
a couple of amatory poems in the number. He did not 
know that it was his son himself who had written of the 
happiness of seeing a Rosamond twine rose and eglantine 
round the bower he was to share with her, 

Still laying on my soul and sense a new and mystic charm 
At every turn of thy fairy shape and of thy snowy arm ; 

but he would not allow Thomas to write again in a 
Magazine that would admit such naughtiness. The sec- 
ond number contained nothing alarming, and Macaulay 
had leave to resume his place as a contributor. He sent 
to the Magazine " Montcontour," "Ivry," "Songs of the 
Huguenots," " Songs of the Civil War," " Scenes from 
Athenian Revels," an essay on "the Athenian Orators," 
and a " Conversation between Mr. Abraham Cowley and 
Mr. John Milton touching the great Civil War." The 
two last named pieces were in the fifth number, published 
in Jul}^ 1824. In October, after the sixth number had 
appeared, Charles Knight went to Cambridge to compose 
differences arising out of his claim to control writers in 
the Magazine. He found a happy dinner in Henry Mai- 
den's rooms to celebrate the gaining of a Trinity Fellow 
ship by Maiden and Macaulay, but the dispute proved 
fatal to Knight's Quarterly. Macaulay had work for 
another Quarterly in prospect. 



IJSr THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 177 

Francis Jeffrey was looking for young men who could 
bring new life into the "Edinburgh Review." In Jan- 
uary 1825 he wrote to a London friend, " Can you not 
lay your hands on some clever young man who would 
write for us? The original supporters of the work are 
getting old, and either too busy or too stupid, and here 
the young men are mostly Tories." Macaulay went to 
Cambridge a Tory ; he was almost turned into a Radical 
by the influence of one of his Cambridge friends, Charles 
Austin ; and he left the University a zealous Whig. The 
search for a " clever young man " who could revive the 
youth of " the Edinburgh Review " had caused sugges- 
tions to be made to him when he was writing in '' Knight's 
Quarterly," and when that journal disappeared Macaulay 
was doing his best to write a first article with which 
Francis Jeffrey should be pleased. That was his article 
on "Milton," which came out in August 1824. Jeffrey 
had written to him, in acknowledging the MS., "The 
more I think, the less I can conceive where you picked 
up that style." The article on Milton at once gave repu- 
tation to its writer. Macaulay was entering to the bar, 
was, in fact, called in 1826, and joined the Northern Cir- 
cuit; but his essay on Milton pointed to another call. 
The " Edinburgh Review " drew from him article after 
article, and the attention drawn to young Macaulay by 
his Avriting in " the Edinburgh " caused Lord Lyndhurst 
to make him in 1828 a Commissioner of Bankruptcy. 
With about £300 a year from his fellowship, and £200 
from his writing for "the Edinburgh," this office made 
Macaulay's income about £900 a year when he was 
twenty-eight years old. He felt — and he was — able to 
succeed either in Literature or in Politics. At that time 



178 OF ENGLISH LITERATUBE 

of his life his ambition was towards a political career, and 
Lord Lansdowne early in 1830 put him into parliament 
as member for what was then his Lordship's pocket 
borough of Calne. The parliament Macaulay joined was 
that by which the Reform Bill was to be passed, and the 
success of his first speech on behalf of it strengthened 
his faith that he might abandon law for politics. He 
voted for reforms in the Bankruptcy Court which swept 
away his own small office of Commissioner, and left him 
with only his earnings from the Review and the income 
from his fellowship, which then had but a few months to 
run. In the autumn of 1830 a sister died, and in the 
spring of 1831 his mother. His home feeling was ex- 
pressed in the close of a home letter: "Love to all, — to 
all who are left me to love. We must love each other 
better." On one day in January 1832 a sister records 
"Yesterday Tom dined with us, and stayed late. He 
talked almost uninterruptedly for six hours." On a day 
in the following February he was with his sisters "in 
high boyish spirits." Lord Lansdowne had been asking 
him about his disposition towards taking office. In the 
" Edinburgh Review " he felt with impatience the superior 
influence of Brougham, then the most popular man in 
Eno^land. He felt that BrouHiam disliked and avoided 
him. Macaulay, therefore, disliked Brougham. 

After the passing of the Reform Bill, Macaulay was 
appointed Secretary of the Board of Control which rep- 
resented the voice of the Crown in the affairs of the East 
India Company. In January 1833 he entered the new 
parliament as member for Leeds. In December he was 
appointed to the seat on the Supreme Council of India 
which was appointed to be held by one who was not a 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTOBIA. 179 

servant of the Company. The salary was ten thousand a 
year. Half of this he could save, and after a few years of 
absence he might hope to return with the independence 
necessary to political success. The immediate prospect of 
political success at home was gloomy, and it was impos- 
sible for him to earn a living by his pen while he took 
active part in politics. His wellbeing was also the well- 
being of his father and sisters. In February 1834, with 
his sister named after Hannah More as his companion, 
Macaulay sailed for India. There Hannah was engaged by 
the end of the year to marry Mr. Charles Edward Trevel- 
yan an energetic reformer whom Lord William Bentinck 
had made Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs. Macaulay 
said of him " He has no small talk. His mind is full of 
schemes of moral and political improvement, and his zeal 
boils over in his talk. His topics, even in courtship, are 
steam navigation, the education of the natives, the equal- 
ization of the sugar duties, the substitution of the Roman 
for the Arabic alphabet in the oriental languages." 

Charles Edward Trevelyan, son of an Archdeacon of 
Taunton, was born in 1807 and educated at the Charter- 
house and Haileybury. In 1848 he was made knight com- 
mander of the Bath because of his exertions for relief of 
Ireland under famine. After zealous service in posts 
of high trust that contributed much to the wellbeing of 
India, he was created a baronet in 1874. The son of Sir 
Charles Trevelyan, George Otto Trevelyan, born in 1838, 
like his father active for reform and now M.P. for Hawick, 
is the nephew of Macaulay to whom we are indebted for 
a life of his uncle first published in 1876. 

After the marriage of his sister Hannah More with Mr. 
Trevelyan, news from home of the death of another sister 



180 OF ENGLISH LITEEATUBE 

filled Macaulay with a grief that caused him to work with 
fresh intensity. He became in March 1835 President of 
the Committee of Public Instruction, and then President 
of a Law Commission to which he proposed the framing 
of a Criminal Code for the whole Indian Empire. In this 
work he took the chief labour, while his work in behalf of 
education and of the reform of Indian Criminal Law was 
voluntary and unpaid. He might have lived an easy half 
idle official life; but he bent all his energies to useful 
labour, encouraged doubtless by the brother-in-law who 
had been added to his Indian household, since the sister 
who went out to be his companion could not leave him to 
live alone. Still also there was the large habit of reading. 
He read through, in one year in India, Sophocles twice, 
^schylus twice, Euripides once, almost all Plato, all 
Herodotus and Thucydides, almost all Xenophon, much 
Aristotle, Plautus twice, Terence twice, Lucretius twice, 
almost all Cicero, and many authors more ; the pencil 
marks in the books implying that he read with care. He 
was also sending articles home to Macvey Napier for '' the 
Edinburgh," among them the article on Bacon, in 1837, 
which filled 104 pages of the Review. That was Macau- 
lay's position, thirty-seven years old, and still in India, 
when the reign of Victoria began. 

We may return now to the publisher of the Quarterly 
Magazine in which Macaulay began his career as a writer. 
In 1825 Charles Knight published Milton's Latin Treatise 
on Christian Doctrine which had been discovered behind 
a press in the State Paper Office, and was edited by the 
Librarian and Historiographer to George IV., the Rev. 
Charles Richard Sumner. He visited Paris in autumn, 
came home and planned a " National Library." At this 



IJSr THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 181 

time Archibald Constable, who had published the first 
number of " the Edinburgh Review," was at the close of 
his career, and was leading the way in the production of 
new and good literature at a cheap price, with his series 
known as " Constable's Miscellany." In 1826 ruin came 
upon many publishing houses. House after house fell, 
the fall of one involving fall of others. Constable and 
Ballantyne were among the ruined, and their fall involved 
the complete ruin of Sir Walter Scott who was a sleeping 
partner with the Ballantynes. Scott, involved in £130,000 
of debt, refused to be cleared by bankruptcy and killed 
himself in the grand struggle to pay all. He did pay all ; 
for what was left unpaid at his death, in 1832, was cleared 
by the profits of the author's edition of his works in 48 
volumes, with new prefaces and notes, which he devised 
and prepared. Charles Knight's publishing house could 
not stand the strain. 

But in the autumn of that year 1826 Henry Brougham, 
not yet Lord Brougham, was organizing the " Society for 
the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge." Charles Knight's 
plan of a National Library was brought to his notice by 
Matthew Davenport Hill. The young publisher was then 
living at Brompton, with a wife and four little girls ; his 
stock in trade had been sold off by private arrangement. 
He was thirty-six years old, and had the world to begin 
again. He tried a little journalism under James Silk 
Buckingham. 

James Silk Buckingham from sailor had turned journal- 
ist in Lidia, where he gave so much offence to the East 
India Company that he was ordered to quit Calcutta. He 
came to England with a good grievance, was a fluent 
speaker, lectured all over England against the Constitu- 



182 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tion of the East India Company, and in so doing helped 
to prepare the way for abolition of its charter. He estab- 
lished in 1824 a journal, called "the Oriental Herald," 
and from 1832 to 1837 represented Sheffield in Parliament. 
He afterwards visited America, published travels, obtained 
a pension from the East India Company, published his 
Autobiography and died in 1855. A son of his, Leicester 
Stanhope Buckingham, who died in middle life, became 
a minor dramatist in London. 

A little was enough of journalism under James Silk 
Buckingham. Charles Knight also edited a " Friendship's 
Offering" for 1827. This was one of a class of "An- 
nuals " which had been introduced into English Literature 
in 1822 by an enterprising German, Rudolf Ackermann, 
who had begun life as a carriage draughtsman, and then 
settled in London as a printseller and publisher of orna- 
mental books. His " Forget-me-not " in 1822 was pub- 
lished as the first of a series of elegant giftbooks for 
Christmas or New Year, containing short tales and poems 
by popular or fashionable writers, illustrated by pictures 
from good artists engraved on copper-plates. The idea 
was immediately caught up by others. Alaric Watts 
followed with a " Literary Souvenir." Samuel Carter 
Hall started " the Amulet." Frederic Mansel Reynolds 
edited "the Keepsake." And so the fashion spread, till 
it included " Bijous," "Gems," "New Year's Gifts," 
"Juvenile Forget-me-nots," "Juvenile Keepsakes," etc., 
etc. The best of these giftbooks were produced with 
great care and at great cost. The Preface to " the Keep- 
sake " for 1829 says that eleven thousand guineas had 
been spent upon its various departments. It contained 
pieces by Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Moore, 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTOBIA. 183 

L. E. L., Lockhart, Theodore Hook, Mrs. Shelley, frag- 
ments of Shelley's writing, also contributions from Henry 
Luttrell and other fashionable writers, and steel or copper- 
plate engravings from pictures by Sir Thomas Lawrence, 
Turner, Landseer, Westall, Stothard, and half a dozen 
more. These Annuals lived into the reign of Victoria, 
but they were gradually superseded by luxurious editions 
of standard works, and giftbooks of many kinds, which 
were lavishly illustrated when a great advance in the art 
of wood engraving caused woodcuts to take the place of 
the steel-plates. 

Charles Knight having edited a "Friendship's Offer- 
ing" in 1827 found in July of that year work to his mind. 
He was then entrusted with the superintendence of the 
publications of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful 
Knowledge. Its first treatises, which appeared as six- 
penny numbers published once a fortnight had been intro- 
duced by Brougham with ''a Discourse on the Objects, 
Advantages and Pleasures of Science." In 1828 Charles 
Knight suggested that a rational Almanac might be pro- 
duced, to supersede the prophetic and other almanacs that 
were still trading on the ignorance of the people. The 
suggestion was not made until the middle of November. 
Brougham fastened upon the suggestion with character^ 
istic energy. The work was at once begun, and the first 
number of " The British Almanac " was published before 
the 1st of January 1829. Although its price was half a 
crown, ten thousand were sold in a week. It was followed, 
within a few weeks, by " the Companion to the Almanac," 
a compact body of information that was to set forth — • 
and still sets forth — from year to year the progress of 
the country. In 1828 Charles Knight was travelling to 



184 OF ENGLISH LITER ATUBE 

organize Local Committees of the Society for which he 
worked. He was planning also a " Library of Entertain- 
ing Knowledge." By July 1829 he had established him- 
self again as a publisher in Pall Mall East, and started 
his " Library of Entertaining Knowledge " at the same 
time that John Murray, pliant to the new demand for 
cheap literature that should give real aid to the progress 
of thought, began the issue of his "Family Library." 
It was as a part of the large movement at this time 
towards a higher education that the London University 
was opened in 1828. Among its first professors were 
George Long, Thomas Hewitt Key and Augustus De 
Morgan, who all gave active assistance to the work of the 
" Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge." John 
William Lubbock, the banker, father of Sir John Lub- 
bock, who is now eminent among men of science, was 
skilled in Astronomy and contributed to the Royal Soci^ 
ety valuable papers on the Tides ; he it was who supers 
intended the astronomical part of the British Almanac. 
Charles Knight, who was throughout life writer as well 
as publisher, contributed a book on Menageries to his 
" Library of Entertaining Knowledge," which appeared 
in monthly half-volumes, and Mr. George Lillie Craik 
first won public attention by contributing to the same 
series a book entitled " the Pursuit of Knowledge under 
Difficulties." 

George Lillie Craik was born in Fife in 1799 and was 
educated at St. Andrews for the Scottish Church. But 
the bent of his mind was towards Literature, and at the 
age of twenty-five he came to London as a writer. His 
" Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties " was a sugges- 
tive book, helpful to many by showing through many 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 185 

examples, clearly and • genially set forth, how the mind of 
man, bent upon worthy work, has strength to make its 
way along the worst and steepest road of life. They fail 
who will not venture boldly even upon a clear way for 
dread of an imagined lion round the corner. In the spirit 
of George Lillie Craik another Scotchman, Samuel Smiles, 
born at Haddington in 1816, trained first to medicine, 
and employed afterwards, till his retirement in 1866, in 
the service of the South-Eastern Railway, has written in 
our later day many a good book. His " Life of George 
Stephenson," in 1856, "Lives of the Engineers," in 1862, 
"Self-Help," in 1862, "Lidustrial Biography," in 1863, 
"Lives of Boulton and Watt," in 1865, "Life of Robert 
Dick, Baker, Geologist and Botanist," in 1878, and other 
books, seek, like the writings of G. L. Craik, to push for- 
ward the great battle of civilization, and aid in the work 
of citizen-building. Mr. Smiles received from the Uni- 
versity of Edinburgh the honorary degree of LL.D. in 
1878, an honour formerly conferred upon George Lillie 
Craik, who was appointed also in 1849 Professor of His- 
tory and English Literature in Queen's College, Belfast. 
He had produced in 1844-5 for Charles Knight's cheap 
volumes "Sketches of the History of Literature and 
Learning in England," which was the first attempt to 
make widely known among the English people the history 
of their own intellectual life. This was expanded in 1861 
into a valuable " History of English Literature and of 
the English Language," of which an abridged edition has 
been and is widely useful as an aid to education of the 
young. 

In 1831 Charles Knight established a " Quarterly 
Journal of Education," edited by George Long, which 



186 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

was continued until 1836. In 1832, the year of the 
Reform Bill, there appeared on the 31st of March the first 
number of " the Penny Magazine." Charles Knight, then 
living at Hampstead, was walking into town one morning 
with Matthew Davenport Hill, and they were regretting 
the large number of unwholesome penny journals that 
degraded the minds of their readers. " Let us," said Mr. 
Hill, "see what something cheap and good shall accom- 
plish. Let us have a penny magazine." "And what 
shall we call it?" asked Charles Knight. "Call it the 
Penny Magazine." In the middle of March the sugges- 
tion was made to Brougham who was then Lord Chancel- 
lor. At once a Committee was called. The very notion 
of a weekly sheet at a penny seemed to some as a touch- 
ing of pitch. " It is very awkward," said one member of 
Committee. But all difficulty was overcome, and the first 
number of the new magazine was out by the end of the 
month. Charles Knight was publisher, and took the risks 
of publication. At the end of the year "the Penny 
Magazine " had a sale of 200,000 copies. 

It is a noticeable illustration of the movement of great 
currents of thought that the conditions of the time in 
1832 which caused Charles Knight to set up " the Penny 
Magazine " in London had only a few weeks before in Edin- 
burgh caused the brothers William and Robert Chambers 
to produce "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal," its price 
being not the penny with an ill name, but three halfpence. 
The Penny Magazine was the more popular for its use of 
woodcut illustrations ; such pictures as it gave from large 
wood-blocks occupying a whole page, were then a new 
feature in book illustration, for a great development of 
the use of wood-engraving dates from this time. The 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA, 187 

success of the Magazine caused Charles Knight to begin 
" the Penny Cyclopsedia," in which men specially qualified 
were to take the subscribers through the whole domain of 
knowledge, in a series of weekly penny numbers forming 
about eight volumes. The first number appeared on the 
2nd of January 1833. As the work proceeded, its limits 
were so much enlarged that at the rate of issue first 
designed, it would have taken thirty-seven years to finish. 
The rate of issue, therefore, was doubled in the second 
year, and the price became two pence a week. After 
three years the quantity issued was doubled again, and 
the subscription became four pence a week. In the year 
of Her Majesty's accession " the Penny Cyclopaedia " was 
still in progress, and it was not finished until 1844. In 
the first year its sale was 75,000. It fell at once to 55,000, 
when two numbers a week were issued, and sank to 44,000. 
After the rate of issue had been increased to four numbers 
a week, the sale steadily declined to 20,000 at the close 
of 1843. The venture was at the publisher's risk, and 
involved him in a final loss of £30,000. In 1850, when 
there was question of the abolition of the paper duty, 
Charles Knight contributed to the discussion an account 
of " The Struggles of a Book against excessive Taxation," 
in which he showed that he had paid to the Excise 
£16,500 for paper duty on ''the Penny Cyclopsedia" 
alone, and that the further effect of the tax upon the 
price of paper, and other considerations, justified him in 
estimating that the whole £30,000 lost to him by that 
venture in aid of higher education would have been saved 
if there had been no Tax on Knowledge. 

Charles Knight was more successful with a handsome 
" Pictorial Bible " suggested to him by the German Bilder- 



188 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

Bibel for the poor. This he began to issue in parts at the 
beginning of 1836, and completed in two years and a half. 
Imj^rovements in the art of wood-engraving enabled him 
to reproduce scriptural designs of the great painters, 
scenery of the Holy Land, illustrations of costume, zool- 
ogy and botan}^, while Dr. John Kitto, as editor, supplied 
excellent notes. In 1838 Charles Knight, still seeking the 
diffusion of knowledge, began the monthl}^ publication of 
a " Pictorial History of England " edited by George Lillie 
Craik and Charles Macfarlane. It reached to the end of 
the reign of George II. in four volumes, but Mr. Macfar- 
lane's strong political feelings caused him to give another 
four volumes to the reign of George HI. The dispropor- 
tion and the want of liberal tone in this part of the work 
greatly diminished its success. Mr. Craik contributed to 
the " Pictorial History of England " the chapters on Reli- 
gion, Literature, and Commerce with some aid from Sir 
Henry Ellis and from Mr. Andrew Bisset. Mr. Edward 
Poynter, father of the Royal Academician, wrote upon 
the Arts. Together with the Pictorial History of Eng- 
land there was running also, edited as well as published 
by himself in monthly numbers, a Pictorial Shakespeare, 
during the production of which his zeal for the study of 
Shakespeare grew. Another of Charles Knight's ventures 
was a work on " London " in weekly numbers. This ex- 
tended to 2500 pages, giving sketches, by different writers, 
of London as it was and as it had been still with abundant 
w^oodcut illustration. In 1842 the seven volumes of the 
Pictorial Shakespeare were completed. Charles Knight 
then published a Biography of Shakespeare written by 
himself and began to produce a Library Edition of the 
poet's works. From that time forward he used his posi- 



IN THE llEIGN OF VICTORIA. 189 

tion as a publisher for the diffusion of Shakespeare's 
works in various forms. " Knight's Store of Knowledge 
for all Readers " was opened with two numbers on Shake- 
speare by Charles Knight himself. After the Penny 
Cyclopaedia was finished, there appeared, in June 1844, 
the first number of " Knight's Weekly Volume," a series 
which was continued for two years without missing a 
week. Then it was continued for another two years in 
a monthly issue as " the Shilling Volume." In volumes 
of this series new books appeared which have secured 
a lasting reputation, among them George Lillie Craik's 
Sketch of the History of English Literature. At this time 
" the Penny Magazine " was declining in sale. Its last 
number appeared in December 1845, and the Society for 
the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, killed by the losses 
on its Biographical Dictionary, took leave of the world 
with an address dated the 11th of March, 1846. 

A Memoir of Robert Chambers published by his sur- 
viving brother William in 1872 "with Autobiographic 
Reminiscences " tells the career of two brothers who, like 
Charles Knight, wrote, and published, and powerfully con- 
tributed to the cheap diffusion of knowledge. They were 
born at Peebles, William Chambers in April 1800, Robert 
in July 1802, each of them with six fingers on each hand 
and six toes on each foot. The outer fingers and toes 
were removed successfully in William's case, but in Rob- 
ert's case not without leaving tender places on the feet 
that caused through life some pain in walking. Their 
father employed weavers in the cotton manufacture, and 
was agent also for Glasgow houses. When he went on 
business to Glasgow, he travelled the forty miles on foot, 
and was two days upon the road. Through too great easi- 



190 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ness in spending, lending, and giving credit he sank in 
worldly position. The whole school education of William 
Chambers ended when he was thirteen, and cost, books 
included, about six pounds. The fees at the elementary 
school were two and two pence a quarter, and at the 
Peebles Grammar School five shillings a quarter. Five 
jDounds in those days would carry the son of a Scottish 
burgher through a course of education that included such 
grounding in Latin and Greek as would prepare for the 
junior classes at the Scottish Universities. The introduc- 
tion of the power loom put an end to the father's business 
as an employer of handloom weavers, and he opened a 
draper's shop in Peebles, at which he gave unlimited 
credit to the French prisoners of war quartered in the 
town. They all went home at the peace in 1814, and not 
one of them ever paid him a farthing. Before 1813 the 
business had ended in bankruptcy and ruin. 

In December 1813 the family left Peebles for Edinburgh, 
the son Robert, whose lameness confined him much to his 
chair and v/ho was looked upon as the scholar of the 
family, being left in Peebles to go on with his education. 
In Edinburgh William Chambers, in May 1814 and at the 
age of 14, became apprentice to a bookseller, whom he was 
to serve for five years at four shillings a week. At the 
close of 1815 his father got employment as manager of 
a salt manufactory called Joppa Pans, on the seashore 
between Portobello and Musselburgh. It Avas established 
to do contraband trade by smuggling salt over the border, 
at a time when salt was subject to high duties in England. 
William was left in Edinburgh to keep himself on his four 
shillings a week. The rest of the family, including Robert, 
went to the smoky home at Joppa Pans. Robert was at a 



IN THE MEIGN OF VICTORIA, 191 

classical school at Edinburgh, with some vague hope of 
his being prepared for the Church, and at first he walked 
to and fro between school and the saltworks ; afterwards 
he shared William's Edinburgh garret to avoid the pain 
of the long daily walk. William'^ employer was agent 
for a State Lottery, and the apprentice saved his master 
postage by personal delivery of piles of circulars. He 
went weary to bed, and had no time of his own but 
what he could make by early rising. He and his brother 
rose in summer at five o'clock to read. Tliey worked at 
French in this way, read Locke and Adam Smith, taking 
notes as they studied. Li winter, want of fire and candle 
stood in the way of home work. But a disreputable jour- 
neyman baker who sometimes earned a shilling a day by 
carrying advertisement boards of the lottery, introduced 
the bookish apprentice to a baker who was passionately 
fond of reading but had no leisure to read. If William 
Chambers would go at five o'clock in the morning and 
read to the baker and his two sons while they were pre- 
paring their batch, he should have for his fee a hot penny 
roll, fresh from the oven. So on winter mornings seated 
on a sack in the baker's cellar, with a penny candle stuck 
in a bottle by his side, William Chambers gave morning 
entertainments, by reading novels of Fielding and Smol- 
lett, also " Gil Bias." The entertainment occupied two 
hours and a half, its price being the penny roll, which was 
a breakfast. After payment of lodging there remained 
one and nine pence a week for board ; and as Sundays were 
spent at the Salt Pans, this was three pence half penny 
a day for food. 

Robert obtained first a little private teaching at Porto- 
bello ; then a place in a counting house five miles from 



192 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Edinburgh, wliicli was ill paid and cost him a daily ten 
miles walk ; then a place in a counting house at Leith. 

Trouble meanwhile came again over the household at 
the Salt Pans. The father was knocked down and robbed 
when carrying home money collected in Edinburgh. He 
was disabled by the assault, and was dismissed by his 
employers. Henceforth he was utterly a broken man, and 
the care of the family rested upon the mother. She would 
set up some little business. William Chambers hurried 
home after business when he heard of his father's dis- 
missal, and he says, " On my unexpected arrival near 
midnight — cold, wet, and wayworn — all was silent in 
that poor home. In darkness by my mother's bed side, I 
talked with her of the scheme she had projected. It was 
little I could do. Some insignificant savings were at her 
disposal, and so was a windfall over which I had cause for 
rejoicing. By a singular piece of good fortune, I had the 
previous day been presented with half a guinea b}'- a good- 
hearted tradesman, on being sent to him with the agree- 
able intelligence that he had got the sixteenth of a twenty 
thousand pound prize in the state lottery. The little bit 
of gold was put into my mother's hand. With emotion 
too great for words, my own hand was pressed gratefully 
in return. The loving pressure of that unseen hand in 
the midnight gloom, has it not proved more than the 
ordinary blessing of a mother on her son ? " 

In 1818 Robert Chambers — then only sixteen — was 
dismissed, as stupid, from his counting house work at 
Leith. William who was older by two years and three 
months, and who, in May of the next year would be out 
of his apprenticeship, then advised his younger brother to 
give up all notion of seeking for employment and begin 



IN THE UEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 193 

work for himself, though it could be only in the very 
humblest way, as bookseller. There was no money, but 
there were as many old books still in possession of the 
family as would make a row on a shelf twelve foot long. 
If they added their schoolbooks they would make another 
foot. William could supply from his small savings one or 
two cheap pocket Bibles, for which he knew that there 
was then growing demand. Here was a stock in trade. A 
poor shop in Leith Walk with room for a stall in front, 
was taken at a yearly rent of six j)ounds. Upon a plank 
in front of it the books of the family were placed, except 
only the Family Bible, which had come down for two 
hundred years from father to son. William with his four 
shillings a week went to live with his brother, and in the 
following year, when, at nineteen, he was out of his ap- 
prenticeship, he set up a business of his own in similar 
fashion. There were no family books to start with, but 
a travelling agent for the sale of cheap editions of old 
standard works at about half the price of those known as 
the " trade editions," came to Edinburgh and had a trade 
sale after a dinner. William Chambers, who had then 
nothing else to do, assisted before dinner in arranging for 
the sale, and next day helped in the packing up. He was 
asked what he was doing for himself, and replied that he 
was going to begin business without money. If he had 
money he would like, he said, to buy some of those cheap 
editions, for he thought he could sell them to advantage. 
The kindly agent liked his frankness and trusted him 
at once with the usual credit for ten poundsworth. He 
chose the books, packed them in an empty tea chest, bor- 
rowed a hotel truck and wheeled them to Leith Walk, 
where he would have his own separate stall. The last 



194 OF ENGLISH LITERATUBE 

week's payment of apprentice wages enabled liim to buy a 
few deals from a woodyard Avith which he made his own 
board, and a pair of trestles. So he began business at 
once, in summer weather. His books were of a salable 
kind, and with great frugality and prudent management 
the little became more. He learnt to put the new books 
into boards himself, and thus add three pence or four 
pence to the profit of each volume by buying them in 
sheets. In bad weather he made copies of poems and bits 
of prose in fine penmanship, in hope of selling them for 
albums. The fine penmanship brought him the goodwill 
of one customer who gave him a large order for books 
handsomely bound, with leave to bring them in small 
parcels as he could afford to get them and with promise 
that each parcel should be paid for on delivery. Next 
year he was able to add to the shop a backroom for a 
dwelling. The bed he put in it he curtained with brown 
paper. 

Next, he wrote an account of David Ritchie, the origi- 
nal of Walter Scott's Black Dwarf, got it printed and 
made a little profit on the sale. This suggested that if 
he could compass a printing press of his own, it might 
be made a source of profit. Opportunity came, when a 
struggling man was selling off and quitting the neigh- 
bourhood. He had constructed a rude printing press for 
himself, a machine that stood on a table, had a printing 
surface eighteen inches by twelve, and creaked in work- 
ing so that it could be heard two houses off. For three 
pounds William Chambers bought this press and a small 
stock of worn type. Having contrived to make or buy 
what else was indispensable, he began the slow labour of 
printing with this machine an edition of 750 copies of the 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTOBIA. 195 

Songs of Burns. There was only type enough for 8 small 
pages, and to produce an edition in this way the press had 
to be pulled twenty thousand times. The reward of his 
patience was a profit of nine pounds. Part of this could 
be spent on improvements of the printing machine. By 
cutting letters on wood with a chisel and penknife bold 
headings were obtained for posting bills. So the small 
business imj)roved a little. William Chambers wrote and 
printed an account of the Scottish Gipsies. Robert had 
been, with equal thrift, improving his little business as 
bookseller, and the two brothers in 1821 joined their wits 
in the production of a magazine of which Robert was to 
be chief writer, William printer and publisher and also 
writer as far as time allowed. The magazine, called " the 
Kaleidoscope, or Edinburgh Literary Amusement," made 
its first appearance on the 6th of October 1821. It was 
to give sixteen 8vo pages for three pence. As William 
had to set the types, to print the sheet in halves, work off 
all copies and stitch the halves together in the odd time 
to be spared from his general business, "the Kaleidoscope " 
obliged him to work sixteen hours a day and allow only a 
quarter of an hour for meals. The venture paid expenses, 
but no more, and the last number of the Kaleidoscope 
appeared on the 12th of January 1822. 

By this time each of the brothers had so managed his 
stock and kept down his expenses as to be worth about 
two hundred pounds. In 1822 Robert wrote and William 
printed "Illustrations of the Author of Waverley." 
Robert at that time removed from Leith Walk to India 
Place, and William in the following year removed to 
Broughton Street. Robert now developed more fully his 
literary taste. He wrote his " Traditions of Edinburgh," 



196 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

produced in numbers, published in two volumes in 1824, 
when he was only twenty-two years old. He obtained 
the goodwill of Sir Walter Scott, of John Wilson, and 
others. There followed from Robert Chambers, in 1825, 
*' Walks in Edinburgh ; " and in 1826, " Popular Rhymes 
of Scotland." William Chambers sold the old printing 
press to another beginner, and enlarged his ventures. He 
wrote a " Book of Scotland " which he sold to a publisher 
for £30. The books they had produced caused the two 
brothers, but chiefly William, to be employed by a pub- 
lisher in compilation of a " Gazetteer of Scotland." For 
this they were paid a hundred pounds. In those days the 
" Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge " began 
its career. The movement towards cheap and wholesome 
literature, as an aid to citizen-building, gathered force, 
and William Chambers suggested to his brother Robert 
that they should try to produce a cheap weekly journal 
containing matter that would really benefit the many. 
Robert agreed to give all possible help with his pen, but 
was discouraged by the general character and condition 
of the low priced papers. Accordingly, with William 
Chambers for editor, there appeared on the 4th of Febru- 
ary 1832 the first number of "Chambers's Edinburgh 
Journal," price three half pence. "The strongholds of 
ignorance," said the editor in his opening address, "though 
not unassailed, remain to be carried." In a few days that 
first number had attained a sale in Scotland alone of fifty 
thousand. Copies of the third number were sent to an 
agent in London, and the sale then rose to eighty thou- 
sand. So it was that the brothers Chambers produced 
their journal, which still lives and thrives, a few weeks 
before the appearance in London, on the 31st of March, 
of Charles Knight's " Penny Magazine." 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA, 197 

After tlie fourteenth number of Chambers's Journal had 
appeared, the brothers no longer carried on separate busi- 
nesses but formed themselves into the firm of W. & R. 
Chambers. In 1833 they began to produce a series of 
sheets on distinct subjects entitled " Chambers's Informa- 
tion for the People," which, as completed, forms two 8vo 
volumes, and of which there were sold 270,000 sets, nearly 
two millions of sheets. In 1835 there was planned and 
begun a series of treatises and schoolbooks entitled " Cham- 
bers's Educational Course," to which Robert Chambers 
contributed a "History of the British Empire" and a' 
" History of the English Language and Literature." Vol- 
umes have been added to this series year after year until 
the present day. That was the position of the brothers 
Chambers at the beginning of the reign of Victoria. In 
1838 William Chambers visited the schools in the Nether- 
lands to acquire knowledge that Avould aid him in his 
practical attempts to advance education in Great Britain. 
What he found he told in a book published in 1839 as a 
" Tour in Holland and the Rhine Countries." Another 
enterprise of the firm was a series of publications for 
parish, school, regimental, prison and other libraries, called 
"Chambers's Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining 
Tracts." These had a very large sale, and were completed 
in twenty volumes. Again another enterprise, begun in 
1859 and completed in ten yearly volumes, was " Cham- 
bers's Encyclopaedia, a Dictionary of Universal Knowledge 
for the People." 

The rough handmade printing press, bought for three 
pounds, to which William Chambers had risen with the 
dawn from his poor bed curtained with brown paper, had 
by this time grown into twelve steam printing machines, 



198 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

in an establishment that gathered under one roof editors, 
compositors, stereotypers, wood engravers, printers, book- 
binders, and which sent abroad an average daily produce 
of fifty thousand sheets of publications various in kind 
but all of service to society. 

In 1844 Robert Chambers, with the help of Dr. Robert 
Carruthers of Inverness, completed in two large volumes 
a '' Cyclopsedia of English Literature," intended to diffuse 
a knowledge of the great English writers by setting 
numerous extracts from their writings in brief records of 
their lives. This work has been, and still is, widely ser- 
viceable. A new and revised edition of it was produced 
in 1860. Essays from Chambers's Journal and other 
works of Robert Chambers were collected in 1847 as his 
" Select Writings " in seven volumes. For some years 
past, he had been studying geology. In 1840 he had been 
elected a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He 
has generally been credited with the authorship of a book 
published in 1844, " Vestiges of the Natural History of 
Creation " that set many talking and some thinking, and 
was one of the first signs of a new rise in the tide of 
scientific thought. " Ancient Sea Margins," published in 

1848, was an acknowledged book. William Chambers, in 

1849, bought an estate in his native county, and in 1859 
presented to his native town a building known as " the 
Chambers Institution," containing such aids to individual 
growth as a library, a reading room, a lecture hall, a 
museum, a Gallery of Art. In 1864 he published a '' His- 
tory of Peeblesshire." Robert Chambers would have 
been made Lord Provost of Edinburgh in 1848, if rancor- 
ous feeling had not been stirred against the supposed 
author of a work inconsistent with a literal faith in the 



m THE BEIGJS- OF VICTORIA. 199 

book of Genesis. But in 1865, and again in 1869, William 
Chambers was honoured by his fellow townsmen in Edin- 
burgh with the office of chief magistrate, and in 1872 
the Edinburgh University conferred on him its honorary 
LL.D. degree. That was the year in which he published 
his memoir of his brother Robert, who had died in March 
1871. Robert's later books had been " the Life and Works 
of Burns " in 1851 ; " Tracings of Iceland and the Faroe 
Islands " in 1856 ; " Domestic Annals of Scotland from 
the Reformation to the Revolution" in 1858; the same 
work continued in 1861 to the Rebellion. His " Book of 
Days," a work upon which great labour was spent, was in 
course of issue from 1860 to 1867. Some help that was 
anticipated failed him, and the strain of labour was too 
great. While engaged in the work, he lost his wife, also 
a daughter. " The Book of Days " was a success, but he 
himself spoke of it as his death blow. He went for health 
to St. Andrews, was made LL.D. by the University there, 
and known as "the Doctor;" but vigour of life was 
gone. In the course of his life he had produced, says his 
brother, upwards of seventy volumes, besides detached 
papers which could hardly be counted. So it is that our 
strong men now fight with the dragons. 



OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 



CHAPTER VIII. 

OF WRITERS WHO WERE BETWEEN FIFTY AND SIXTY 
YEARS OLD AT THE BEGINNING OF THE REIGN. 

Aged between fifty and sixty at the accession of 
Victoria were Sir Henry Ellis, 60 ; Henry Hallam, 59 ; 
Thomas Moore, 58; Horace Smith, 58; James Morier, 
57 ; John Wilson Croker, 57 ; Edward Jesse, 57 ; David 
Brewster, 56 ; Ebenezer Elliott, 56 ; William Jerdan, 55 ; 
Benjamin Thorpe, 54 ; Leigh Hunt, 53 ; Frederick Mar- 
ry at, 51. Of these Thomas Moore and Leigh Hunt were 
associated with the literature of the past. 

Moore was born in May 1779 in a tavern in Dublin. 
He was a clever child who could be set on a table to recite 
verses, and used also as vocalist to enliven domestic sup- 
pers. A good mother was determined that her clever boy 
should be well taught, and it Avas to her that he owed a lib- 
eral education at Trinity College Dublin, which was opened 
in 1753 to Eoman Catholics, although they were still 
excluded from its honours. It was his mother, again, who 
scraped together money enough to send her boy to London 
to be entered at the Temple. He took with him a Trans- 
lation of Anacreon into free verse, which he obtained 
leave to dedicate to the Prince Regent. It was published 
in 1800, and followed in 1802 by frivolities of his own, in 
verse, entitled "the Poetical Works of the late Thomas 
Little." Lord Moira got for Moore in 1803 an appoint- 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 201 

ment in Bermuda. He went to it, but did not take it 
seriously, and left it in charge of a deputy. In 1806 he 
published " Odes and Epistles " which Francis Jeffrey con- 
demned for their immorality, explaining, after he had met 
the author in a bloodless duel, that he called them immoral 
" in a literary sense." Jeffrey and Moore became good 
friends. In 1811 Thomas Moore married. He could put 
smooth lines, with little sense in them, to melodies of his 
own shaping, and warble them to his own accompaniment. 
A kindly, witty, little man with such a gift could add 
greatly to an evening's entertainment. For want of 
strength of character Moore, therefore, became a diner- 
out, and sank like Sterne into the position of an orna- 
ment at great men's tables. He loved his wife, but she 
was not invited to dine out with him. He loved his 
country, and of his serious verse the best is to be found 
in one or two of the " Irish Melodies " that he began to 
produce in 1807, and that appeared, with the music set to 
Irish airs, in the course of the next years. " The Two- 
penny Post Bag," in 1812, showed an aptitude for light 
political satire that gave breadth to a reputation founded 
on the Irish Melodies. Three thousand pounds were 
offered to Moore for a long poem. It appeared in 1817, 
as " Lalla Rookh," a dainty confection of Eastern ro- 
mance. In the next year he went to Paris, and again 
showed his skill in playful verse satire with " the Fudge 
Family in Paris." His reputation was then at its highest. 
Other works followed, including a Life of Sheridan, and a 
Life of Byron, in 1830, for which Moore received two 
thousand guineas. In 1835 the Whigs gave him a pension 
of <£300 a year. He had not only entertained them well 
at Holland House with his musical genius, but he had 



202 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

aided their political warfare with rhymed satire that was 
airy, witty and good-natured. Moore could not reach the 
force of Byron as satirist, but if he had less force he had 
more kindliness. In the reign of Victoria Thomas Moore 
published "Alciphron," in 1839. His Poetical Works 
were collected in ten volumes in 1840-2, and he closed his 
career as a writer with a " History of Ireland," published 
in 1842-5. In 1848 his mind failed. He was then 69 
years old, and he died in February 1852 at the age of 73. 
His '' Memoirs, Journals, and Correspondence " were pub- 
lished after his death by his friend Lord John Kussell, 
afterwards Earl Russell, who was by thirteen years his 
junior. 

James Henry Leigh Hunt, like Moore, had been in con- 
tact with Byron and his friends. His grandfather was 
a Rector at Bridgetown, Barbadoes. His father, educated 
in America, graduated at Philadelphia and New York, 
became a lawyer in America, held with the British Gov- 
ernment in the American Revolution, and was driven to 
England. In England, as he could not practise law, he 
was ordained, and ran into debt as preacher at a chapel in 
Paddington. He became afterwards tutor for a time to 
Mr. Leigh, nephew to the Duke of Chandos, and it was 
from him that the son born at Southgate in 1784 received 
his name of Leigh Hunt. The father ended a career 
of debts and difficulties in 1809. Leigh Hunt entered 
Christ's Hospital at seven years old, after Coleridge had 
left for the University. When he left school, he wrote 
verses which his father caused to be published in 1802 
under the name of "Juvenilia," with a portrait of the 
young poet, and a long list of subscribers, chiefly beaten 
up from among members of the admiring father's congre- 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 203 

gations. Then followed two or three years of idling, play- 
going, reading, and playing at being a lawyer's clerk in 
the office of a brother Stephen. In 1805 Leigh Hunt's 
brother John set up a paper called " the News," and 
Leigh wrote criticisms for his paper, some of which were 
in the appendix of a volume, published in 1807, called 
" Critical Essays on the Performers of the London The- 
atres." At the beginning of 1808 the two brothers set up 
" the Examiner," and Leigh gave up a clerkship in the 
War Office which had been given to him not long before. 
In 1809 he married. " The Examiner " fought for reforms 
in a way that gave some offence to Whigs and much to 
Tories. In 1812 " the Examiner," commenting upon some 
fulsome adulation of the Prince Eegent by the Morning 
Post, asked who could imagine " that this ' Exciter of 
desire ' (bravo. Messieurs of the Post /) — this ' Adonis in 
loveliness' was a corpulent man of fifty! — in short, this 
delightful, blissful, wise, pleasurable, honourable, virtuous, 
true, and immortal prince, was a violator of his word, a 
libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of 
domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a 
man who has just closed half a century without one single 
claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of 
posterity ! " A prosecution for libel having been founded 
upon this article, Leigh Hunt and his brother were sen- 
tenced to two years imjorisonment and a fine of five hun- 
dred pounds each. He was imprisoned from the 3d of 
February 1813 to the same date in 1815, in a pleasant 
room and with much freedom of action, " the Examiner " 
being meanwhile continued. In 1815 Leigh Hunt pub- 
lished " The Feast of the Poets " and " The Descent of 
Liberty." In 1816 he completed and published his " Story 



204 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of Eimini," a development in graceful, easy rhyme of the 
story of Dante's Paolo and Francesca. Much of it had 
been written in prison. He had acquired the friendship 
of Shelley whose " Hymn to Intellectual Beauty " first 
appeared in "the Examiner." Shelley's generosity, of 
which many had experience, was once shown to Leigh 
Hunt in the form of a present of fourteen hundred pounds 
to get him out of debt. "I was not extricated," says 
Leigh Hunt, " for I had not yet learned to be careful : but 
the shame of not being so, after such generosity, and the 
pain which my friend afterwards underwent when I was 
in trouble and he was helpless, were the first causes of my 
thinking of money matters to any purpose." Shelley and 
Keats first became acquainted with each other under Leigh 
Hunt's roof. Li 1817, Leigh Hunt published Essays by 
himself and William Hazlitt under the name of " the 
Round Table." Li October 1819 he began and continued 
for sixty-six weeks a paper called "the Lidicator," named 
from an African bird, the Cueuhis Indicator of Linnseus 
that " indicates to honey hunters where the nests of wild 
bees are to be found." " The Examiner " was then declin- 
ing. Shelley and Byron had a proposal for a Liberal jour- 
nal. Leigh Hunt was tempted to go to Italy and talk 
about it. On that errand he left England in November 
^1821. The issue of the scheme was a quarterly called 
"the Liberal," of which four numbers appeared in 1822 
and 1823. The first number contained Byron's best satire, 
the " Vision of Judgment," the second his " Heaven and 
Earth," and the fourth his translation from Pulci's " Mor- 
gante Maggiore." Back in England, Leigh Hunt was 
again pleasantly active. For half a year, from January to 
July, 1828, he published some of liis pleasantest essays in 



IN TUB REIGN OF VICTORIA. 205 

a series of papers called " the Companion." In September 
1830 he set up a literary and theatrical paper called "the 
Tatler," which lasted until February 1832. It was a new 
form of a paper he had started as "the Chat of the 
Week," which brought with it difficulties about stamp 
duty. In 1832 he published " Sir Ralph Esher," a ficti- 
tious autobiography of a gentleman of the Court of Charles 
the Second. From April 1834 to December 1835 he was 
producing a cheap miscellany of essays, criticisms and 
quotations, called the " London Journal," which avowed 
its purpose to be one with that of the brothers Chambers 
in their " Edinburgh Journal ; " only its character was to 
be "a little more southern and literary." It was to 
deal with " the ornamental part of utility." Its purpose, 
indeed, was that which was fulfilled by the whole life of 
Leigh Hunt, to commend to the world, for its own health, 
the kindly graces of good literature. In 1835 he pub- 
lished a poem condemning the War Spirit. It was enti- 
tled " Captain Sword and Captain Pen," and had Milton's 
lines from Paradise Regained for its motto : 

" If there be in glory ought of good, 
It may by means far different be attained, 
Without ambition, war, or violence." 

In this spirit Leigh Hunt passed into the reign of Vic- 
toria. Years had sweetened a temper always gentle, and 
the civilizing touch of his genius was to be felt even in 
the weakest of his works. In February 1840 his play of 
" the Legend of Florence " was produced at Co vent Gar- 
den, Miss Ellen Tree — afterwards Mrs. Charles Kean — 
playing the heroine. The Queen went twice to see it and 
commanded its repetition at Windsor. Its theme was the 



206 OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE 

legend of a wife, buried when in a trance, awaking in the 
tomb, rejected by her husband, and seeking shelter in her 
lover's house. A criticism attributed to Sir Edward 
Lytton Bulwer spoke of it as " one of the finest plays 
that has been produced since Beaumont and Fletcher." 

In 1840 Leigh Hunt wrote for Editions of their Works 
critical biographies of Wycherley, Congreve, Yanbrugh, 
Farquhar, and Sheridan. In 1842 he published " the Pal- 
frey," a poem on an old romance theme. In 1844 a volume 
entitled " Imagination and Fancy " had for its purpose to 
give selections of best passages from English poets, with 
aids to the perception of their beauty. It included an 
essay upon the Nature of Poetry. A companion book of 
"Wit and Humour, selected from the English Poets," 
with an illustrative essay on Wit and Humour, followed 
in 1846. In these books Leigh Hunt was still showing 
the honey hunters where the nests of wild bees are to be 
found. In 1846 he published also "Stories from the 
Italian Poets ; with Lives of the Writers," bringing home 
to English readers some taste of the honey in Italian hives. 
In 1848 appeared as a book " A Jar of Honey from Mount 
Hybla," first published in " Ainsworth's Magazine " in 
1844. His honey was made of the history, the legends, 
and the poetry of Sicily. In the same year, 1848, a volume 
called " The Town " was formed of sketches of London, 
many of which had first appeared in Leigh Hunt's " Lon- 
don Journal ; " it is a London graced with pleasant mem- 
ories of wits and poets. In 1849 followed "A Book for 
a Corner," a selection of things so uttered in verse or 
prose that " age cannot wither nor custom stale " their 
infinite variety. In 1849 Leigh Hunt provided a book of 
what he called " Heading for Railways : or Anecdotes and 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 207 

other Short Stories, Reflections, Maxims, Characteristics, 
Passages of Wit, Humour, and Poetry, etc." In 1850, 
when his age was sixty-six, he published his Autobiography 
rich in recollections of the wits and poets who were friends 
of his youth, frank also in a self-revelation that extenuated 
nothing and assuredly set nothing down in malice. 

In 1853 Leigh Hunt published a volume entitled " the 
Religion of the Heart. A Manual of Faith and Duty," 
expressing pure morality, with love to God and Man, but 
shrinking from the dogmas of theology. In 1855 lie added 
to his volume on " the Town " another that contained 
memorials of Kensington, "the Old Court Suburb," of 
which some chapters had been contributed to " Household 
Words." In the same year he published a selection of 
the beauties of Beaumont and Fletcher, and a collection 
of his own "Stories in Verse." Of four unpublished 
plays that remained by him, one, " Lover's Amazements," 
was produced with success in 1858, the year before its 
author's death at the age of seventy-five. He had written 
also an essay of considerable length on " the Sonnet," as 
part of a book planned in America, which appeared in 
1867 as "The Book of the Sonnet. Edited by Leigh 
Hunt and S. Adams Lee." 

Horace Smith, who lived through the first ten years of 
the reign of Victoria, and contributed some novels to the 
Literature of the Reign, was about five years older than 
Leigh Hunt. The brothers James and Horace Smith were 
sons of a solicitor. James the elder followed his father's 
profession and Horace became a stockbroker. In 1812 
they grew famous by clever parodies of the styles of the 
chief poets who were supposed to have contributed Ad- 
dresses to be spoken at the reopening of Drury Lane. 



208 OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE 

"The Rejected Addresses" went through twenty-four 
editions. James, the elder brother, wrote no more, and 
died in 1839. But Horace produced a dozen books in the 
days of George lY. and William lY., his first and best 
novel being " Brambletye House " in 1826. In the years 
between 1840 and 1845 Horace Smith published ^'Oliver 
Cromwell;" "the Moneyed Man;" "Adam Brown;" 
" Arthur Arundel " and " Love and Mesmerism." In 1846 
his " Poetical Works " were collected. Leigh Hunt writes 
that Shelley once said to him, " I know not what Horace 
Smith must take me for sometimes : I am afraid he must 
thing me a strange fellow : but is it not odd, that the only 
truly generous person I ever knew, who had money to be 
generous with, was a stockbroker ! And he writes poetry 
too," continued Shelley, his voice rising in a fervour of 
astonishment — "he writes poetry, and jmstoral dramas, 
and yet knows how to make money, and does make it, and 
is still generous ! " 

Ebenezer Elliott, who became known as " the Corn Law 
Rhymer," was born in 1781, one of the eight survivors of 
eleven children. His father was a clerk in a foundry at 
Masborough, a suburb of Rotherham in Yorkshire, where 
his salary was sixty or seventy pounds a year with house, 
candle and coal. His mother once confided to young 
Ebenezer a dream of her maiden life : " I had placed 
under my pillow a shank bone of mutton to dream upon; 
and I dreamed that I saw a little broad-set, dark, ill- 
favoured man, with black hair, black eyes, thick stub-nose 
and tup-shins : it was thy father." It was a lively father 
who preached ultra-Calvinism once a month on Sundays, 
and gloried on weekdays in Cromwell and Washington. 
After some schooling, young Ebenezer was put to work in 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 209 

the foundry. An illustrated book of botany drew liim to 
jolants ; he traced the pictures, sought and dried the plants. 
He heard his brother one day read a part of Thomson's 
"Seasons" in which the polyanthus and auricula were 
described, compared the verse afterwards with the living 
flowers, and was drawn to delight in Thomson. Then 
he began to versify, with an imitation of Thomson's de- 
scription of a thunderstorm. When Ebenezer was four- 
teen years old, a poor curate died and bequeathed his 
books to Ebenezer's father. At twelve, he says, he had 
almost known the Bible by heart; at sixteen he could 
repeat, without missing a word, the first, second, and sixth 
books of "Paradise Lost." His first publication was a 
poem written at the age of seventeen called " the Vernal 
Walk," for which he found a j)rinter at Cambridge. Then 
he tried tales, and even a dramatic poem upon Bothwell. 
Till the age of 23 he was still working in the Foundry, in 
which he obtained a share. But the foundry failed at 
Rotherham, and in 1831 Ebenezer Elliott began business 
apart in Sheffield, with <£100 of borrowed money. He 
dealt in the raw material of Sheffield cutlery, and throve 
for the next six years. In 1832 he published the " Corn 
Law Rhymes," by which he made his mark in Literature. 
Intense conviction that most of the troubles of the country 
were rooted in Protection gave force to the use of his gift 
as a rhymer for attack upon the Corn Laws. And what, 
he asked in the Prologue to his book, 

And what but scorn and slander will reward 

The rabble's poet, and his honest song ? 
Gambler for blanks, thou play'st an idiot's card ; 

For, sure to fall, the weak attacks the strong. 

Aye! but what strength is theirs M'hose might is based on wrong? 



210 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

At the beginning of the reign of Victoria, Ebenezer 
Elliott was in business at Sheffield with a wife and family 
in his home at Upperthorpe. He still gave definite form 
to his conception of what man has made of man, and with 
the zeal of a writer to whom one truth fervidly appre- 
hended stands for all truth, held that "the Corn Laws 
are the cause of all the crime that is committed." In 
1842 he gave up business, realizing about seven thousand 
pounds, and withdrew to an eight roomed cottage that he 
built for himself on land bought at Great Houghton near 
Barnsley. He had put six sons out into the world, and 
there remained only the wife and two daughters in the 
happy home. One of his sayings was that " it is a positive 
duty to marry, and also to be a Radical, that good legisla- 
tion may allow marriage to be as happy as it ought." He 
was correcting proof sheets of his last volume "More 
Prose and Verse," just before his death in 1849. 

The forms of character are infinitely various, though a 
score of generic types would probably contain them all. 
The shrewd, honest single-minded zealot, who fights for 
one cause, which is to him the cause of causes, and who 
looks neither to the right nor left of it, may be as great as 
Luther ; as serviceable for one battle as Ebenezer Elliott ; 
as weak as the feeblest crotchetmonger ; who falls out of 
whatever ranks he enters if his comrades do not give 
their whole minds to the worship of some fetish of his 
own. Li all the type is clear, and so is its place or use in 
the world's history. The type of the soldier has not 
changed since the beginning of history ; nor has that of 
the scholar. 

The Principal Librarian of the British Museum at the 
accession of Victoria was Sir Henry Ellis, born in 1777. 



IN THE BEIGN OF YICTOBIA. 211 

He was educated at Merchant Taylor's school and at 
Oxford ; published a History of St. Leonard's Shoreditch 
when he was 21 ; graduated ; obtained a Fellowship from 
his College, St. John's, and was an Assistant Librarian, 
first at the Bodleian, then in the British Museum. He 
married in 1805 ; in 1806 was made Keeper of the Printed 
Books and in 1812 Keeper of the MSS. in the British 
Museum. He was Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries 
and of the Royal Society. In 1814 he was appointed 
Secretary to the Trustees. In 1816 he published an 
introduction to Domesday Book. In 1818 he edited Dug- 
dale's '' Monasticon ; " in 1824 published a first collection 
of " Letters Illustrative of English History." In 1827 he 
was appointed Principal Librarian of the Museum, and 
about the same time published a second volume of his 
Illustrative Letters. In 1832 Mr. Ellis was knighted by 
William IV. Sir Henry Ellis wrote on the Towneley 
Marbles in 1834, on the Elgin and Phigaleian Marbles in 
1836. His chief contribution to Victorian Literature was 
a third volume of " Letters Illustrative of English His- 
tory," published in 1846. His wife died in 1854 within a 
year of their golden wedding day, and two years later he 
resigned his office of Librarian, his age then being seven- 
ty-nine. But he lived on into his ninety-second year, dy- 
ing in January 1869. Blind study of the past, as Selden 
said, the too studious affectation of bare and sterile anti- 
quity is nothing else but to be exceeding busy about noth- 
ing, but, he added, "the neglect or only vulgar regard 
of the fruitful and precious part of it, which gives neces- 
sary light to the present in matter of State, Law, History 
and the understanding of good authors, is but preferring 
that kind of ignorant infancy which our short life alone 



212 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

allows us before the many ages of former experience and 
observation, which may so accumulate years to us as if 
we had lived from the beginning of time." In this true 
sense Sir Henry Ellis was an antiquary. 

Like honour is due to Benjamin Thorpe and Joseph 
Bos worth, who were the revivers in this country of the 
study of the ancient Literature and Language of the 
people. Thorpe was born in 1783, Bosworth in 1790. 
Benjamin Thorpe in the course of a long life of about 
ninety years, edited all the chief pieces of First English 
or Anglo-Saxon Literature ; Csedmon, in 1832 for the 
Society of Antiquaries; in 1834, his "Analecta Anglo- 
Saxonica " included ^Ifric's Colloquy and the fine frag- 
ment of Judith. Within the reign of Victoria Mr. Thorpe 
edited, in 1842, the important collection of poems known 
as the " Codex Exoniensis," in 1846 the *' Anglo-Saxon 
Gospels," in 1853 "King Alfred's Orosius," in 1855 ''Beo- 
wulf," in 1865 the " Diplomatarium Anglicum jEvi Sax- 
onici," a collection of English Charters from the time 
of Ethelbert to the Conquest. Thorpe also printed at 
Copenhagen in 1830 a translation of Erasmus Rask's 
Grammar of Anglo-Saxon, and in 1865 reproduced it in a 
cheap form for the use of students. Benjamin Thorpe's 
studies in later life extended to Icelandic, and he pub- 
lished in 1866 a translation of Ssemund's Edda. 

Dr. Bosworth, who published in 1823 a small Anglo- 
Saxon Grammar, produced a substantial Anglo-Saxon 
Dictionary at the beginning of the reign, in 1838, which 
he reproduced in a cheap form revised and abridged for 
the common use of students ten years later. He was at 
work upon the larger revision and the full elaboration of 
his dictionary when he died, but he found time to produce 



IK THE REIGN OF VICTOBIA. 213 

in 1855 a standard edition of the text of " King Alfred's 
Orosius" from collation of MSS. In Oxford alone had 
the attempts made in the past to found University Pro- 
fessorships of Anglo-Saxon not entirely failed. Dr. Bos- 
worth occupied the chair of Anglo-Saxon when he died, 
and left provision by his will for the re-establishment of a 
like Chair at Cambridge. Such students as these have 
strengthened the foundation of a scientific study of the 
past, but History had varied little from the form of gen- 
eralization that had been established by the influence of 
Hume and Gibbon when Henry Hallam wrote. 

Henry Hallam, son of a Dean of Bristol, was born in 
1777. He studied at Eton and Oxford, settled in Lon- 
don, and was among the first contributors to " the Edin- 
burgh Review." In 1818 he published the earliest of his 
three histories, a "View of the State of Europe during 
the Middle Ages." Its wealth of good matter was kept 
at arm's length from the reader by use of a Latin vocabu- 
lary and the conventional style which in 1818 was still 
thought by many to be dignified. The style of the 
second work "the Constitutional History of England 
from the Accession of Henry VII. to the Death of George 
II.," published in 1827, was far better. Anxieties over a 
first book no longer oppressed him. He had the dignity 
of a real interest in his theme, a theme to his taste, 
and he expressed accurately the result of calm and clear 
thought working upon knowledge. Of English Constitu- 
tional History before the reign of Henry VII. Hallam had 
given a sketch in his " View of Europe during the Middle 
Ages." The superiority of Hallam's " Constitutional 
History" to his next book is very distinct. This third 
history was published at the beginning of the present 



214 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

reign, in 1837.-9, and is an " Introduction to the Litera- 
ture of Europe in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries." 
Henry Hallam had lost in 1833 his eldest son, the A. H. 
H. of Tennyson's " In Memoriam." Other griefs, through 
sickness and deaths or dread of deaths at home, troubled 
the mind of one of the gentlest of scholars. This may 
have weakened his hold on his work; but his sense of 
poetry was weak, and he was a blind guide to the study 
of the poets. Those parts of the work that had real 
interest for its writer, that touched the line of his own 
tastes and studies, and came fairly within reach of his 
clear judgment, are, however, of enduring value. Henry 
Hallam died in January 1859. His books live and will 
live. No historian of our time has ventured on as wide a 
range of study, or has shown a wider range of power. 

Two novelists are yet to be named among the writers 
who were nearly of Hallam's age ; they are James Morier 
and Captain Marryat. James Morier, born in 1780, was 
appointed in 1810 British Envoy to the Court of Persia. 
He published in 1812 his "Earlier Travels through Persia, 
Armenia, Asia Minor to Constantinople," and in 1818 
published " A second Journey through Persia." In 1824 
he used his knowledge of Persian life in a first novel " the 
Adventures of Hajji Baba in Ispahan,'* which was fol- 
lowed in 1828 by " Hajji Baba in England," where he is 
duly impressed by the " moonfaced Bessies " and other 
wonders of the land. Hajji Baba having established 
firmly Morier's credit as a lively novelist with a theme 
of his own and master of it, there followed, still with 
more or less in them of the humour or romance of Persian 
life, in 1832 '' Zohrab," and in 1834 " Ayesha." Within 
the present reign he published in 1837 " Abel AUnut ; " 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 215 

in 1839 "the Banished;" in 1841 "the Mirza; " in 1842 
" Martin Toutrond." James Morier died in 1848. 

Frederick Marryat, born in 1786, like Morier drew his 
novels from a side of life, with humours of its own, which 
was familiar to him and new to most of his readers. He 
distinguished himself in the navy during the war time 
before 1814, was made a captain for his services in the 
Burmese war, and earned a good service pension. In 
1834 he broke fresh ground for the public entertainment 
with " Peter Simple," a light-hearted novel of sailor life 
and its oddities. It was immediately followed by a sec- 
ond novel, not less pleasant, "Jacob Faithful." In the 
following year Marryat published a collection of short 
stories, "The Pacha of many Tales," and then came 
another sailor's novel, "Japhet in Search of a Father." 
Upon the three novels " Peter Simple," " Jacob Faithful," 
and " Japhet in Search of a Father " Captain Marryat's 
reputation rested. He never surpassed them, but in all 
that followed there was wholesome variety and always a 
fresh breath from the sea. " Midshipman Easy," and " the 
Pirate," and " Three Cutters " were published at the end 
of the reign of William IV. In the reign of Victoria, 
during its first ten years. Captain Marryat remained a 
busy writer, and produced a dozen novels, beginning 
Avith " Snarleyyow, or the Dog Fiend," in 1837, and end- 
ing in 1847 with " the Children of the Forest." He died 
in August 1848. 

A daughter, Florence, born in the year of the accession 
of Victoria, has inherited some touch of her father's skill 
and is known as Florence Marryat — now Mrs. Francis 
Lean, author of many novels that are widely read. She 
published also in 1872 the "Life and Letters" of her 
father. 



216 OF ENGLISH LITERATUBE 

William Jerdan, born at Kelso in 1782, lived to the age 
of eighty-seven, and at the age of 84 published, in 1866, 
a book about " Men I have known." His way of life 
brought him for half a century in close relation with good 
writers. He began life with little education, had a desire 
towards the business of literature, became an active jour- 
nalist, wrote for newspapers and was for two or three 
years part proprietor and editor of "the Sun," but he 
had a quarrel with a joint proprietor that found its way 
into the Court of Chancery. In 1817 William Jerdan 
founded "the Literary Gazette," earliest of the modern 
literary papers ; earliest of all was the " Mercurius Libra- 
rius," started in 1680. William Jerdan was editor of 
"the Literary Gazette" for 33 years, from 1817 to 1850, 
and in that position had abundant opportunity of busying 
himself among the authors. A literary paper called " the 
Athenaeum" had been started by Dr. Aikin in 1807, but 
it died in 1809. The name was revived for a literary 
paper that was among the feebler ventures of James Silk 
Buckingham, and Jerdan's " Literary Gazette," though 
not vigorous, had its own way until " the Athenaeum " 
passed into the hands of Charles Wentworth Dilke (born 
in 1789) who had then retired on a pension from the 
Navy Pay Office. Under Mr. Dilke's vigorous manage- 
ment " the Athenseum " soon became the leading literary 
journal, and " the Literary Gazette " gave but a dim light 
during the latter years of William Jerdan's management. 
After quitting it, he wrote his " Autobiography " in four 
volumes, published in 1853-4. " The Literary Gazette " 
struggled for life until 1862 when it tried the effect of 
change of name, and became "the Parthenon." As "the 
Parthenon" it died in 1863. "The Athenaeum" has 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 217 

maintained its position. Various attempts have been 
made to provide general readers with a second weekly 
literary paper. From 1844 to 1863 there was "the 
Critic;" from 1863 to 1867 there was "the Reader," 
which did not long survive an article in which Mr. F. J, 
Furnivall attacked Dr. Johnson's Preface to his Dic- 
tionary under the belief that it was just written by a 
modern editor. In 1869 Dr. Charles Appleton, a man of 
fine accomplishments and earnest character, whose early 
death in 1879 was regretted throughout England, estab- 
lished a weekly literary journal called " the Academy," in 
which the writers were to sign their papers. The aim of 
the projector was a pure and high one, there was no 
thought in his mind of business rivalry or journal-found- 
ing as a money speculation ; he had earnest friends to 
help him, and the direct sincerity of purpose gave an im- 
pulse to his paper, which he named " the Academy," that 
has retained force until the present day. 

John Wilson Croker, born in Gal way in 1780, was edu- 
cated at Trinity College Dublin and called to the bar in 
1807. He became Secretary to the Admiralty, an active 
politician, and a frequent writer in the " Quarterly Re- 
view." He was made a Privy Councillor in 1828. His 
chief contribution to Literature was an edition, published 
in 1831, of Boswell's " Life of Johnson." Within the reign 
of Victoria he edited in 1848 Lord Hervey's Memoirs; 
published in 1853 a " History of the Guillotine," reprinted 
from " the Quarterly Review " of 1844 ; and, at the close 
of his life, published reprints from "the Quarterly" of 
Essays on the French Revolution. He died in 1857. 
There may have been something of the feeling of a party 
writer on one side towards a party writer on the other side 



218 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

in Macaulay's condemnation of Croker's Boswell for bad 
scholarship, gross carelessness, bad English, and weak judg- 
ment ; but the weak book certainly came to pieces in the 
strong man's hand. Of Croker's imperfect understanding 
of Johnson himself, Macaulay said little, for his own insight 
into Johnson's character was much less deep than Carlyle's. 
An edition of Croker's Boswell was afterwards issued in 
which all discovered errors were corrected. 

Edward Jesse, the author of some pleasant books of 
popular natural history, was a clergyman's son, born in 
1780. He obtained offices at courts, through the friend- 
ship of Lord Dartmouth, whom he had served as private 
secretary. In 1830, when his offices were abolished, he 
obtained a pension. He published in 1846 "Anecdotes 
of Dogs," and in the following year a book of " Favourite 
Haunts and Rural Studies." He also edited Izaak Wal- 
ton's "Complete Angler" and Gilbert White's "Natural 
History of Selborne." He died in 1868. His literary taste 
was inherited by his son, John Heneage Jesse, born in 1815, 
who became a Civil Servant in the Admiralty. He pub- 
lished a poem at the age of sixteen on Mary Queen of Scots, 
and dealt afterwards with history as a prose writer. He 
published in 1839 four volumes of " Memoirs of the Court 
of England during the Reign of the Stuarts ; " in 1848 
three volumes of " Memoirs of the Court of London from 
the Revolution in 1688 to the Death of George II. ; " in 
1845 " Memoirs of the Pretenders and their Adherents ; " 
in 1847-50 four volumes of " Literary and Historical Mem- 
oirs of London and its Celebrities ; " in 1861 " Richard HI. 
and his Contemporaries ; " and in 1867 " Memoirs of the 
Life and Reign of George III." He died in July 1874. 
The impulse to write passed also to the eldest daughter 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 219 

of Edward Jesse, Mrs. Houstoun, who wrote two books 
of travel, and several novels, " Recommended to Mercy," 
" Such Things Are," etc. 

There remains one man of the group of writers who were 
between fifty and sixty years old at the beginning of the 
reign, and he is representative of pure Science, Sir David 
Brewster, born at Jedburgh in 1781. He left Divinity for 
Science. In 1815 he received from the Royal Society the 
Copley Medal, and again in 1818, for his discoveries in 
polarisation of light. He had been engaged at this time 
for some years, and remained busy till 1830, on the pro- 
duction of a Cyclopsedia, to which young Carlyle contrib- 
uted, and he was working at the practical application of his 
studies of light to the improvement of lighthouses. He 
received honorary degrees from Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Ox- 
ford and Cambridge ; became Fellow of the Royal Socie- 
ties of London and Edinburgh ; received the Royal Medal 
of the Royal Society in 1830 ; and was knighted in 1832. 
He was one of the founders of "the British Association 
for the Advancement of Science," which held the first of 
its annual meetings in 1831 ; and he was at the same time 
fellow-worker with Brougham and others for the general 
advancement of knowledge as the chief civilizing power. 
He died in February 1868. His " Treatise on Optics" was 
published in 1831. Within the present reign he published, 
in 1841, a volume entitled " Martyrs of Science," and in 
1854 " More Worlds than One." This was followed in 1855 
by " Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton," to the study of whom 
lie had been especially drawn by his own study of light. 



220 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 



CHAPTER IX. 

MEN OF THE NEXT DECADE OF YEARS. 

When we watch the tide as it flows in, wave after wave 
goes back over its old ground. There seems to be as much 
retreating as advancing, and it is so here with the tide of 
life as it draws nearer to the ground on which we stand. 
With the writers born within the next ten years, those 
who were between forty and fifty at the beginning of the 
reign, we have another wave advancing over time that has 
already once or twice been covered. Forty-nine was the 
age of Sir Francis Palgrave, Sir William Hamilton and 
Theodore Hook. Forty-eight was the age of Richard Har- 
ris Barham, author of the Ingoldsby Legends. Dr. Bos- 
worth, already spoken of, John Payne Collier and Bryan 
Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall) were forty-seven. Lord 
John Russell and Henry Hart Milman were forty-six. 
Half a dozen writers were forty-five years old, Michael 
Faraday, Sir Roderick Murchison, John Keble, Sir Archi- 
bald Alison and Sir John Bowring, also Mrs. Somerville 
and Charles Knight, who have been included in the record 
of distinct movements of thought. William Maginn, who 
wrote as Father Prout, was forty-four. Forty-three was 
the age of John Gibson Lockhart, of George Grote and 
of Thomas Arnold, whose son Matthew Arnold was then 
a boy of fifteen. Thomas Carlyle was forty-two years old 
and two novelists were severally aged forty-one and forty, 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 221 

George Richard Gleig and Samuel Lover. Sir Charles 
Lyell was forty. When we have glanced at the w^ork of 
these writers, leaving only Thomas Carlyle to be associ- 
ated with the later generation, we shall have only to speak 
of writers who represent the literature with which we are 
in immediate contact, writers of whom the earliest born, 
if he had reached old age, would in the course of nature 
have been living now. Their fellowship of work joins, as 
the world needs, old and young, the caution of experience 
and the courage of hope, in labour that, each in his own 
way, their living readers share. 

Reaction from the literature of gloom and tears and 
strained emotion, quickened the public readiness for jest. 
The healthy English character has a quick sense of fun. 
In the days of the stiff French critical influence, fun had 
been dismissed as vulgar. When the reaction against 
formalism set in, there was a gush of emotion, an intensity 
of diverse speculation, that, doubtless, was cause of good 
mirth in the way of ridicule, but in itself was often as 
oppressive as the superseded formalism. With the reaction 
against this kind of excess came first an increased demand 
for jokes, by way of change. Life had not come to be 
more frivolous, but its frivolity had come to be more open. 
And presently afterwards, since reaction is always from 
one extreme to its opposite, there came over society a 
fashion, or as Ben Jonson's Poetaster would have called 
it, a humour, for the cynical air of one who would seem to 
have no zeal about anything. That, being as insincere as 
the false sentiment, was a form of stupidity which could 
hardly pass for an improvement even upon the frank rude- 
ness of practical jesting. 

Theodore Hook was good for nothing if he was not 



222 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

funny, and his fun was that of buoyant spirits weighted 
with no wisdom. He was born in 1788, and died in 1841. 
His father was a musical composer, a brother of his became 
Dean of Worcester. He wrote for the theatres, and ac- 
quired high social reputation as a table companion. He 
could keep up a running fire of jokes, or pour out, at will, 
a string of rhymes that introduced playful allusions to 
every member of the company he might be in ; could sit 
at the piano and cleverly expand a verbal joke against 
somebody present into a burlesque opera, and pass on to 
practical jokes in the small hours of the morning. He 
held an office in the Mauritius from 1813 to 1818. His 
deputy there embezzled X 12,000 of public money, for 
which Hook was responsible. Then came some little 
experience of imprisonment for debt ; then followed jour- 
nalism, and novel writing. When the " John Bull " was 
set up to advocate Tory policy, in 1821, Theodore Hook 
was its guiding spirit, and by fun and audacity, with little 
or no restraint of good taste, he made his party warfare 
pleasant to the public of that day. He began to write 
stories in 1824, with " Sayings and Doings." His best 
novels are '' Jack Brag " and '' Gilbert Gurney " (1836- 
37). He was editing " the New Monthly Magazine " at 
the beginning of the present reign. 

Theodore Hook's life was written, and published in 1848, 
by his friend Richard Harris Barham, who wrote in ]3layful 
irregular rhyme, under the name of Thomas Ingoldsby, 
" the Ingoldsby Legends." Barham was born at Canter- 
bury in 1789, and died in June 1845. When five or six 
years old he inherited the estate and manor house of 
Sappington. When a boy at St. Paul's school he was up- 
set in the Dover mail, and had his right arm shattered, so 



IJSf THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 223 

that it was crippled for life. In later years he was thrown 
from a gig and had a leg broken. Another time he dam- 
aged one of his eyes. After graduating at Oxford he took 
orders, and became a minor canon of St. Paul's and rector 
of St. Augustine and St. Faith's in the City of London. 
He wrote in "Blackwood's Magazine," in the "Edinburgh 
Review," and other journals, and contributed to a Bio- 
graphical Dictionary. In January 1837 Richard Bentley 
published the first number of " Bentley 's Miscellany " 
with Charles Dickens, in the first flush of his fame, writ- 
ing " Oliver Twist " in it, and a strong company of lively 
writers to support him. Barham was among their number, 
and his contributions of a series of burlesque legends in 
free and lively rhyme were first collected into a volume 
as " the Ingoldsby Legends " in 1840. The quick play of 
fancy, the odd turns of rhyme, the capital illustrations by 
George Cruikshank to which they were wedded, and the 
wholesome spirit of good humour that runs through all, 
have made " the Ingoldsby Legends " a book about which 
readers have not ceased to care. Richard Barham pub- 
lished also a novel in 1841, "My Cousin Nicholas," which 
had been contributed in sections to " Bentley 's Miscel- 
lany." 

William Maginn, — Dr. Maginn,--was born at Cork in 
1793 and died in 1842. He was educated at Trinity Col- 
lege, Dublin, and turned to account good scholarship in 
ancient and modern languages in his lively work as a 
journalist who had a hearty relish for true literature and 
fought stoutly for Church and State. He was one of the 
vigorous band of writers for " Eraser's Magazine " in the 
days when its publisher dared to print Carlyle's " Sartor 
Resartus." Maginn's series of papers contributed to 



224 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

" Fraser " in 1834 as the " Reliques of Father Prout, late 
P.P. of Watergrasshill in the County of Cork, Ireland," 
illustrated with etchings by young Maclise, were first col- 
lected into a book in 1836. A new edition of it, edited 
by a still surviving comrade, was published in 1860 in 
''Bohn's Illustrated Library," with the etchings. It re- 
produced also the sketch by Maclise of Maginn addressing 
his fellow contributors after a dinner at 212 Regent Street, 
the sketch giving more than two dozen portraits of men 
of mark. Theodore Hook's face, coarsely good-humoured, 
is between Lockhart's, refined and calmly self-possessed, 
and Brewster's, thoughtful. Over the heads of Brewster 
and David Macbeth Moir, who, under the signature of 
" Delta," was especially known as the poet of Blackwood, 
rises the young head of Thomas Carlyle, with shaggy hair, 
hollow cheeks, and a kindly play of amusement about the 
mouth, for Maginn is speaking. Young Thackeray is on 
the other side of the table, drawing all his face into his 
eyeglass in the endeavour to see somebody. Ainsworth 
also is there as a serene and handsome youth. His profile 
is set as a foil by the full face of Coleridge, who, with 
great round eyes, suggests the meditative owl. In Ma- 
ginn's "Reliques," the Watergrasshill Carousal has its 
own life, though its form was suggested by John Wilson's 
"Noctes Ambrosianae." The poet's love of nature that 
inspires many a fine passage in the " Noctes " is replaced 
in the "Reliques of Father Prout" by a skill in comic 
rhymes, kindred to those of " Thomas Ingoldsby," and by 
a knack at turning verse out of one language into another, 
in which Dr. Maginn had no equal. One of his papers 
on " The Rogueries of Tom Moore " is said to have, for a 
time, afflicted Moore himself, who thought that he was 



JJSr THE REIGN OF VICTOBIA. 225 

really accused, or that the world might suppose him to be 

accused, of taking his songs out of the French and Latin. 

Of " Go where Glory waits thee " he was told that it was 

really written by the Comtesse de Chateaubriand, who was 

born in 1491, and that the original referred to the battle 

of Pavia ; the " original " being Maginn's version of 

Moore's song into French. In "Lesbia hath a beaming 

eye," " Tommy " was accused of having stolen a piece 

from the Latin, and the Latin was in like manner, given 

in evidence, 

Lesbia semper hinc et inde 

Oculorum tela movit ; 
Captat omnes, sed deinde 

Quis ametur nemo novit; 
and so to the end. 

Samuel Lover, a lively writer of Irish stories, was born 
in Dublin in 1797, son of a stockbroker. He began life 
as a miniature painter and, in 1828, became a member of 
the Royal Hibernian Academy, of which he afterwards 
was secretary. While succeeding as a portrait painter, he 
wrote in a magazine a series of " Legends and Stories 
illustrative of Irish Character," published in 1832. This 
was followed in 1833 by "Popular Tales and Legends 
of the Irish Peasantry," and in 1834 by a second series of 
"Legends and Stories of Ireland." At the beginning of 
the reign of Victoria, Samuel Lover came to London and 
gradually gave up the pencil for the pen. He wrote for 
magazines, produced a series of Irish songs which were 
set to music by himself and of which some, as "Rory 
O'More " and " Molly Bawn " were very popular. They 
formed, in 1839, a volume of " Songs and Ballads." To 
successive numbers of " Bentley's Miscellany" Samuel 
Lover contributed, in 1842-3, a novel called " Handy 



226 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Andy," having Irish blunders for its matter of amuse- 
ment. He wrote also musical dramas, as " Rory O'More " 
and " the White Horse of the Peppers," and in the latter 
part of his life followed the example of Albert Smith in 
setting up a popular entertainment. Albert Smith, a 
clever writer of gay trifles, achieved very great success as 
a comic showman of Mont Blanc in Piccadilly. Samuel 
Lover, also depending wholly on himself, gave " Irish 
Evenings " enlivened with songs and music of his own. 
In 1848 he carried his " Irish Evenings " to America, and 
made on his return a new entertainment out of his ad- 
ventures there. He obtained a small civil-list pension 
towards the close of his life, and died in July 1868. 

Thomas Crofton Croker, who was a year younger than 
Samuel Lover and died in 1854, was another illustrator of 
Irish song and story. He was born in Cork, and was at 
first put into a counting house, but he had artistic skill, 
was clever with the pencil, though he did not, like Lover, 
become painter by profession, and he had literary tastes 
that fastened upon legends and antiquities of Ireland. 
He obtained a clerkship in the Admiralty, which brought 
him to London. There he became known as a genial 
Irish antiquary. In 1825 he published " Fairy Legends 
and Traditions of the South of Ireland," and in 1839 
" the Popular Songs of Ireland, collected and edited with 
Introductions and Notes." He had planned he says "a 
series of songs, which would have told the history of Ire- 
land from the battle of the Boyne to the present time, in 
a novel, impartial, and, according to my view, interesting 
and instructive form." But that would have extended to 
three or four volumes, and the publisher's faith in the 
public intelligence did not warrant more than one volume 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 227 

of popular songs. Mr. Crofton Croker quoted in his 
preface an Irishman's yiew of the drawing-room conven- 
tionality of Moore's Melodies. " It has often struck me 
with astonishment," said this critic, "that the people of 
Ireland should have so tamely submitted to Mr. Thomas 
Moore's audacity in prefixing the title of ' Irish ' to his 
'Melodies.' That the tunes are Irish, I admit; but as 
for the songs, they in general have as much to do with 
Ireland as with Nova Scotia. What an Irish affair, for 
example, ' Go where glory waits thee,' etc. Might it not 
have been sung by a cheesemonger's daughter of High 
Holborn, when her master's apprentice was going, in a fit 
of valour, to list himself in the third Buffs, or by any 
other amatory person as well as a Hibernian Virgin? 
And if so, where is the Irishism of the thing at all? 
Again, 

' When in death I shall calmly recline, 
O bear my heart to my mistress dear ; 
Tell her it lived upon smiles and wine ' — 

Tell her it lived upon fiddlesticks ! pretty food for * an 
Irishman's heart for the ladies ' ! . . . Allusions to our 
localities, it is true, we sometimes meet with, as thinly 
scattered as plums in the holiday puddings of a Yorkshire 
boarding school, and scattered for the same reason — just 
to save appearances, and give a title to the assumed name. 
There's 'the Yale of Avoca,' for instance, a song upon a 
valley in Wicklow, but which would suit any other valley 
in the world, provided it had three syllables, and the 
middle one of due length." This critic would have found 
as much Irishism or more, in English George Colman's 
notion of an Irish song : 



228 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

" Crest of the O'Shaughnashane I 

That's a potato plain, 
Long may your root every Irishman know ! 

Pats long have stack to it, 

Long bid good luck to it ; 
Whack for O'Shaughnashane ! Tooley whagg ho ! " 

William Carleton, another Irish writer, was of the same 
age as Crofton Croker. He was born in 1798, the son of 
a small farmer at Clogher, county Tyrone. He was 
trained as a priest, but turned writer, and, in 1830, pub- 
lished "Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry." They 
were followed by a second series in 1832, at the time 
when Samuel Lover was producing his "Legends and 
Stories of Ireland." Such books at such a time aided the 
movement towards a quickening of generaL intelligence, 
by seeking to bring Englishmen and Irishmen nearer 
together. They helped thousands of readers to a kindly 
understanding of the Irish character. Carleton was after- 
wards an active writer of Irish tales. In 1841 he pub- 
lished " the Fawn of Spring Vale," " the Clarionet " and 
other Tales; in 1845 "Valentine McClutchy, the Irish 
Agent;" in 1847 "Art Maguire ; " in 1852 "Red Hall,' 
"the Squanders of Castle Squander," "Jane Sinclair" 
and other Tales; in 1855 "Willy Reilly;" and "the 
Black Baronet " in 1858. William Carleton received a 
literary pension of X200, and after his death in January 
1869, a pension of XlOO was granted to his widow. 

George Robert Gleig, the son of a Scotch bishop, was 
born in 1796, educated at Glasgow and Oxford, and in- 
tended for the church. Natural inclination drew him to 
a soldier's life. He entered the army in 1812, and was 
with the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsula. After 



JN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 229 

other service with the army he returned to Oxford, com- 
pleted his studies, and in 1822 obtained a curacy, from 
which he was advanced to the rectory of Ivy-church in 
Kent. His experience in the Peninsula furnished matter 
for his first successful book, " The Subaltern," in 1825. 
Besides published Sermons, and a History of the Bible, 
in 1880, followed by a " History of the British Empire in 
India," he produced in 1837 a Life of Monro ; in 1840 a 
Life of Warren Hastings ; in 1848 a Life of Clive ; the 
Story of Waterloo in 1847, and in 1858 an adajjtation of 
Brialmont's Life of Wellington. Among Mr. Gleig's 
popular books there have been " Chelsea Pensioners " in 
1829; "Allan Breck," a novel, in 1834; "Chelsea Hos- 
pital" in 1837; "the Only Daughter" in 1839. In 1844 
he was made Chaplain to Chelsea Hospital, and in 1846 
Chaplain General to the Forces. Having been appointed 
Inspector General of Military Schools he established and 
edited, in 1850, a series of School books. In 1851 ap- 
peared his " Light Dragoon." In 1856 Mr. Gleig edited 
a book on " Religion in the Ranks." Among writers of 
the reign of Victoria, Mr. Gleig is the one who has done 
most to associate in the public mind the nobler strain of 
life with the profession of a soldier. 

Of wars between France and England before Waterloo, 
Sir Archibald Alison gave, from his own strongly Tory 
point of view, an account in his " History of Europe from 
the Commencement of the French Revolution in 1789 to 
the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815." This work, 
which extended over ten volumes, was in course of publi- 
cation at the beginning of the Reign of Victoria. It was 
completed in 1842. In 1847-9 there was a seventh edition 
of it, in 20 volumes post Svo, and between 1852 and 1859 



230 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

its author produced a continuation of the history from 
1815 to 1852, the continuation occupying eight more vol- 
umes. Sir Archibald published also in 1847 " The Mili- 
tary Life of John, Duke of Marlborough ; " in 1850 three 
volumes of Essays, Political, Historical, and Miscellaneous, 
which first appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, and, in 
1861, " Lives of Lord Castlereagh and Charles Stewart, 
Marquesses of Londonderry," in three volumes; besides 
other books. This voluminous writer was the son of a 
Rev. Archibald Alison, who died in 1839, and who had 
written in 1812 what was in its day an admired " Essay 
on the Nature and Principles of Taste." Archibald the 
younger was born in 1792, and educated at Edinburgh for 
the Scottish bar, to which he was called in 1814. He 
obtained official appointments, was elected Rector of Mari- 
schal College in 1845, and in 1851 obtained the like 
honour from the University of Glasgow. In 1852 he ob- 
tained a baronetcy, and in 1853 the honorary degree of 
D.C.L. from the University of Oxford. He died in May 
1867. Alison, as a historian was one of the last of the 
school of writers who told a piece of history through, 
according to their bias of opinion, with some generaliza- 
tion, little or no original research, and superstitious belief 
in a way of writing that was once supposed to befit the 
dignity of the historian. His book covers one of the most 
important periods in human history, and has its use. His 
facts are arranged in a clear sequence, and fully set forth, 
although they are diffusely told by an interpreter without 
any conception of their meaning. 

Sir Francis Palgrave represents in his life's labour the 
advance towards a later school of historians, who lay stress 
upon the importance of a constant trial of asserted facts 



IJ^ THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA, 231 

by search into the evidence on which they rest. He was 
born in 1788, of a rich Jewish family, and his name was 
Francis Cohen until the age of 35, when he married and 
took the maiden name of his wife's mother. He was acting 
then as a solicitor, but four years after his marriage he was 
called to the bar, and practised chiefly before the House 
of Lords. In the year of his being called to the bar, 1827, 
he published a work on Parliamentary Writs. In 1831 
he produced a valuable " History of England during the 
Anglo-Saxon Period," followed in 1832 by a " History of 
the Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth 
during the Anglo-Saxon period." In that year he was 
knighted. Between 1830 and 1837, Sir Francis Palgrave 
produced ten volumes of the publications of the Record 
Commission, and in the first year of the reign of Victoria, 
in 1838, he was apj)ointed Deputy Keeper of the Records. 
He published also in 1837 a picture of the Middle Ages 
with Marco Polo and Roger Bacon in the foreground as 
" Truths and Fictions of the Middle Ages ; The Merchant 
and the Friar." In 1851 Sir Francis Palgrave published 
the first of the four volumes of a " History of Normandy 
and England." The second volume followed in 1857. 
The third and fourth, completed from his papers after his 
death in July 1861, brought the history to the end of the 
reign of William Rufus. This section was published in 
1864. 

Two sons of Sir Francis Palgrave have distinguished 
themselves as writers. Francis Turner Palgrave, born in 
1824, and educated at the Charterhouse and Baliol College, 
Oxford, was for five years Vice-Principal of a Training 
College for schoolmasters. He was afterwards for a few 
years private secretary to Lord Granville and is now one 



232 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of the three Assistant Secretaries of the Committee of 
Council on Education. Mr. F. T. Palgrave has proved 
himself a graceful poet and a refined critic. He published 
" Idylls and Songs " in 1854, and has made two choice col- 
lections from the English poets, one called " The Golden 
Treasury of English Songs," published in 1861, the other 
a " Children's Treasury of Lyrical Poetry," published in 
1877. In the same year, 1877, he edited a selection from 
the poems of Herrick. He has also aided in the refining 
of the public taste for art ; was editor of the Art Cata- 
logue of the Great Exhibition of 1862, and published 
Essays on Art in 1866. 

William Gilford Palgrave, second son of Sir Francis, 
born in 1826, and, like his brother, educated at the 
Charterhouse and at Oxford, served for a short time as 
lieutenant in the Bombay Native Infantry. But he joined 
tlie Order of the Jesuits and became one of its missiona- 
ries in Syria and Palestine. In 1865 he published a very 
interesting " Narrative of a Year's Journey through Cen- 
tral and Eastern Arabia " made in 1862-63. The journey 
was one of exploration undertaken for Napoleon III. 
Since the explorer could speak Arabic like a native, he 
travelled as a native, with elaboration of disguise not only 
for the more safety but also as a way to secure closer 
observation. 

Returning to the men who were of like age with Sir 
Francis Palgrave, we find one of them, John Payne Collier, 
who is, in 1881, the patriarch of living English writers, 
drawing towards the close of his ninety-third year. Born 
in January 1789, he was but a year younger than Byron, 
and three years older than Shelley. His father was in the 
service of "the Times" newspaper and he began the world 



IN THE EEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 233 

as a reporter, at the same time securing a call to the bar 
in the Middle Temple. His interest in the old English 
dramatists was shown by his first work, "the Poetical 
Decameron," published in 1820. In 1825 he produced a 
new edition of Dodsley's Old Plays with addition to their 
number, and in 1831 he published, in three volumes, a 
" History of Dramatic Poetry," in which he laid broader 
and deeper foundations for a study of the English Drama 
than had been laid by any man before him. He found 
in the Duke of Devonshire a liberal friend. In 1835 he 
founded, partly upon documents in the library of Lord 
Ellesmere, of which some have since been considered 
forgeries, a record of " New Facts regarding the Life of 
Shakespeare." This was followed in 1836 by » New Par- 
ticulars " in a letter to Alexander Dyce, and " Further 
Particulars" in 1839. At this time Mr. Collier began to 
produce little privately printed editions of rare tracts and 
poems, a very small number of copies of each, often not 
more than 25, being printed. In 1842 he produced his 
Library edition of the works of Shakespeare, its successive 
volumes coming before the public side by side with those 
of the Library edition by Charles Knight. A second 
revised edition of Mr. Collier's Shakespeare followed in 
1858. This had to take account of the corrections in a 
volume that had become famous as '' the Perkins Folio." 
In the spring of 1849 Mr. Collier bought, he said, from 
Mr. Rodd, a dealer in old books, for thirty shillings a copy 
of the second folio of Shakespeare (1632), which, when 
bought, was put upon an upper-shelf and neglected, until 
he discovered and, in May 1852, first published the fact, 
that this old folio abounded in marginal corrections, and 
that they were in a contemporary handwriting. The 



234 OF ENGLISH LITERATUBE 

handwriting was supposed to be that of a Thomas Perkins, 
whose name was written in the volume, and whose correc- 
tions might have been based upon actual knowledge of 
the text. The " Corrected Folio," as it is now termed, 
became a subject of warm controversy. It was then placed 
on view, in 1859, in the MS. department of the British 
Museum, where any student might examine it for himself. 
When first spoken of, it had been shown at the Society of 
Antiquaries; but when the volume, having fallen into 
suspicion, was exposed to closer scrutiny, it lost authority. 
It was evident that the old writing had been carefully 
imitated over pencillings of the words to be engrossed, the 
pencillings being in a modern running hand which was here 
and there to be seen under the ink. There was nothing 
left to be said or thought about the Perkins folio by any 
temperate student but to warn others of its worthlessness 
and regret that Mr. Collier should have been again misled. 
Whose time was wasted on the manufacture of the notes 
we do not want to know. When Englishmen had in their 
own Literature an unknown world to explore, John Payne 
Collier was one of the few who led the first bands of the 
pioneers. Much of what younger men repeat by rote, it 
was he who found. He taught it to their grandfathers 
and fathers. He has done his part towards bringing 
many out of darkness into light, and for the stumble here 
and there, who is it that never stumbles ? In 1880 Mr. 
Collier produced in three substantial volumes a second 
edition of his " History of Dramatic Poetry," embcdying 
all notes of correction and addition that he had made 
during the interval of nearly half a century since the first 
issue of the book. 

If we turn now to the Literature of Science we find 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 235 

within this group of the men born in the same decade Sir 
Roderick Murchison and Sir Charles Lyell, the two fore- 
most geologists of their time. Roderick Impey Murchison 
was born in Ross-shire, the son of Kenneth Murchison of 
Tarradale, in 1792. He was educated for the army, and 
saw service in the Peninsular war, as an officer in the 36th 
Foot, in 1808-9. He was afterwards on the staff of his 
uncle. General Sir Alexander Mackenzie, and then Cap- 
tain in the 6th Dragoons. He left the army in 1814, 
married in 1815, hunted, travelled, and began his active 
studies of geology. In 1825 he was elected Fellow of the 
Geological Society. In 1827 he studied the older strata 
in the Highlands with Professor Sedgwick, and began a 
course of investigation which he continued systematically 
in England and Wales after 1831. This led to his use in 
1835 of the term " Silurian," to characterize a great natu- 
ral system of ancient deposits which had not before been 
classified, and the type of which was found in Siluria, or 
the country of Caractacus and the old Britons known as 
the Silures. Murchison completed in 1838, and published 
in 1839, at the beginning of the reign of Victoria, his great 
work on "the Silurian System," dedicated to his fellow 
labourer Professor Adam Sedgwick. Sedgwick, who was 
about six years older than Murchison, held for more than 
fifty years the chair of Geology founded at Cambridge by 
Dr. John Woodward. Sedgwick lived to the age of 87, 
dying in January 1873 ; Murchison lived to the age of 79, 
dying in October 1871. Murchison's researches as a geol- 
ogist extended over many parts of Europe. He directed 
a geological Survey of Russia for the Czar Nicholas, and 
published, in 1845, the " Geology of Russia and the Ural 
Mountains." At this time he first pointed out that gold 



236 OF ENGLISH LITEEATURE 

would be discovered in Australia, and he urged govern- 
ment action three years before the gold was actually 
found. In 1854 he published " Siluria. A History of 
the Oldest Rocks in the British Isles and other Coun- 
tries." The fourth edition of this book, produced in 1867, 
included " the Silurian System " and much new matter. 
It was the final definition of the chief work of its author's 
life. He was knighted after his return from Russia ; he 
succeeded Sir Henry De La Beche in 1855 as Director 
General of the Geological Survey of the British Isles ; in 
1863 he was made Knight Commander of the Bath, and 
in 1866 a baronet. Four years after his death there ap- 
peared a Memoir of his life and labours, with a sketch of 
the rise and progress of Palaeozoic Geology in Britain, by 
Dr. Archibald Geikie, who then was and still is Murchi- 
son Professor of Geology and Mineralogy in the Univer- 
sity of Edinburgh. 

Charles Lyell, five years younger than Murchison, and 
also a Scot, was born in Forfarshire in 1797, eldest son of 
a botanist who lived at Kinnordy. He was educated in 
Sussex, at the Midhurst Grammar School, and afterwards 
at Oxford, where he took his M.A. degree in 1821. He 
was called to the bar, but, having private means, applied 
himself to the study of Geology, to which he had been 
drawn by the lectures of William Buckland, then reader 
in Mineralogy and Geology at Oxford, and afterwards 
Dean of Westminster, in which office he died aged 72, in 
1856. In 1830, 1832 and 1833 Lyell first published in 
three volumes his "Principles of Geology," a book of 
which eleven editions appeared in his life time, and which 
has done more than any single book to give impulse to 
the study of Geology, by tempering all its details with 



7iV THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 237 

philosopliic thought. In 1845 Lyeii published geological 
investigations in the New World, in a book of " Travels 
in North America ; " followed by a " Second Visit to the 
United States," in 1848. In that year he was knighted, 
and he was created a baronet in 1864. When Mr. Charles 
Darwin's " Origin of Species " appeared, Lyell, himself apt 
at scientific generalization, gave close attention to its rea- 
soning, and produced in 1863, as the result of his study, 
a book proving " The Antiquity of Man." He died in 
1873. 

The decade produced not only these foremost geolo- 
gists, but also a great chemist in Michael Faraday, who 
was born in 1791 and died in 1867 at the age of 76. He 
was the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith who had settled in 
London. After some elementary education Faraday was 
apprenticed, at thirteen, to a bookseller and bookbinder. 
He had great natural genius, of which the bent was 
towards the form of science in which he afterwards ex- 
celled. As a boy he made experiments and he sought 
books to aid him. When he was twenty-one he attended 
lectures given by Sir Humphry Davy at the Royal Insti- 
tution, sent Davy his notes, and sought his aid to an 
escape from trade. Sir Humphry Davy became inter- 
ested in him, and made him, in 1813, an assistant in the 
laboratory of the Royal Institution. Five years later 
Faraday began to show results of work. In 1824 he 
married. In 1825 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal 
Society. In 1827 he published a treatise on "Chemical 
Manipulation." In 1830 he began to contribute to the 
Royal Society accounts of his discoveries in magnetism 
and electricity. He had then been appointed Lecturer 
on Chemistry at the Royal Military Academy Woolwich. 



238 OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE 

In 1830 Charles Babbage, a famous mathematician, who 
was born in the same year as Faraday and died in 1871, 
published " Reflections on the Decline of Science in Eng- 
land." In 1831 Faraday edited " a Foreigner on the 
alleged Decline of Science." In 1832, and again in 1838, 
the Copley Medal of the Royal Society was awarded to 
him for his discoveries. In 1833 he became Professor of 
Chemistry to the Royal Institution with which he had 
been, and was afterwards, associated during his whole 
scientific life. In 1835 his services obtained from the 
state a pension of X300 a year. A volume of his " Experi- 
mental Researches " was published in 1839 ; a second in 
1844 ; a third in 1855 ; a fourth in 1859. In 1858 the 
Queen allotted to him rooms at Hampton Court. Hon- 
ours were showered upon him, but he retained through- 
out life the simplicity of the true student of nature. He 
was deeply but unaifectedly religious, with an open kind- 
liness, and childlike in his freedom from the outward crust 
that forms on most of us by contact with the world. 
One of the most refined pleasures in London was to hear 
Faraday at the Royal Institution giving Christmas lec- 
tures to an audience of children. The last of such courses 
published was on " the Chemical History of a Candle," in 
1861, the year in which decline of strength caused him to 
resign his office at the Royal Institution. 

Science applied to Philosophy and History is rep- 
resented in the group of writers who were between forty 
and fifty years old at the beginning of the reign, by Sir 
William Hamilton and George Grote. James Mill, the 
father of John Stuart Mill, was an older man, who died a 
year before the reign began. 

Sir William Hamilton, born at Glasgow in 1788, and 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 239 

educated at the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford, was 
called to the Scottisli bar at the age of twenty-five. At 
the age of thirty-three he became Professor of Universal 
History in the University of Edinburgh. His unsuccess- 
ful contest with John Wilson for the chair of Moral 
Philosophy has already been mentioned. In July 1836, at 
the age of forty-eight, he was elected at Edinburgh to the 
chair of Logic and Metaphysics, for which he was pecu- 
liarly qualified, and his fame then began to spread through 
Europe. He became the head of a distinct school of 
Philosophy. He had distinguished himself by contribu- 
tions to " the Edinburgh Review " of philosophical arti- 
cles on Cousin's Philosophy, in 1829 ; on Perception in 
1830; on Logic in 1833. The first course of lectures 
given by liim in the Edinburgh University were on Meta- 
physics ; each lecture being usually written on the even- 
ing and night before its delivery. Li that way, a course 
of three lectures a week extending over five months, was 
produced. Li the next session, 1837-8, a course of Logic 
was given, and most of the Lectures were produced in the 
same way. These courses of lectures, each occupying two 
volumes, were published after Sir William Hamilton's 
death edited by the Rev. Henry Longueville Mansel of 
Oxford and Dr. John Veitch, Professor of Logic at Glas- 
gow. The lectures on Metaphysics were published in 
1859, and those on Logic in 1860. The greater number 
of the footnotes which appeared in Sir William Hamil- 
ton's edition, published in 1847, of the Works of Thomas 
Reid were written at the time when he was first deliver- 
ing his lectures. There appeared also between 1854 and 
1860 an edition by him in eleven volumes of the Works 
of Dugald Stewart. Sir William Hamilton continued to 



240 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

lecture until his death in 1856. "For twenty years," 
say the editors of his lectures, — " from 1836 to 1856 — 
the Courses of Logic and Metaphysics were the means 
through which Sir William Hamilton sought to discipline, 
and imbue with his pliilosophical opinions, the numerous 
youth who gathered from Scotland and other countries to 
his classroom ; and while by these prelections the author 
supplemented, developed and moulded the Rational Philos- 
ophy, — leaving thereon the ineffaceable impress of his 
genius and learning — he, at the same time and by the 
same means, exercised over the intellects and feelings of 
his pupils an influence which, for depth, intensity, and 
elevation, was certainly never surpassed by that of any 
philosophical instructor. Among his pupils there are not 
a few who, having lived for a season under the constrain- 
ing power of his intellect, and been led to reflect on 
those great questions regarding the character, origin, and 
bounds of human knowledge, which his teachings stirred 
and quickened, bear the memory of their beloved and 
revered instructor inseparably blended with what is high- 
est in their present intellectual life, as well as in their 
practical aims and aspirations." Sir William Hamilton's 
essays, chiefly from the Edinburgh Review, were pub- 
lished in 1852 as " Discussions on Philosophy," and from 
these the majority of educated readers derive their impres- 
sions of his teaching. His philosophical system wa^ that 
of a Natural Realist. He taught that every fact in philos- 
ophy is derived from direct consciousness. Philosophy is 
only a scientific development of the facts which conscious- 
ness reveals. The endless diversities among philosophers 
are due, he said, to their disposition to appeal then only 
to consciousness when they can quote it in support of pre- 



JiV THE REIGN OF VICTORIA, 241 

conceived opinions. Naturally taken, it is an unerring 
criterion. But philosophers have seldom or never taken 
the facts of consciousness, the whole facts of conscious- 
ness, and nothing but the facts of consciousness. They 
have either overlooked, or rejected, or interpolated. No 
fact is to be taken as a fact of consciousness that is not 
ultimate and simp>le. The whole fact is to be taken with- 
out reserve, and nothing but the fact. Inferences of rea- 
soning are to be regarded as subordinate deductions, and 
rejected when they contradict the facts. In conscious- 
ness, he also taught, there is a Duality, the self and the 
outer world, the ego and the non-ego, known together and 
known in contrast to each other ; mind and matter, not 
only given together but in absolute coequality. The one 
does not precede, the other does not follow ; and, in their 
mutual relation, each is equally dependent, equally in- 
dependent. Those who accept this fact in its integrity, 
Sir William Hamilton called Natural Realists, or Natural 
Dualists. But he said that nearly all modern philosophers 
held other views. 

George Grote was at once philosopher and historian. 
His grandfather was a merchant, Andreas Grote, who 
came over from Bremen in the middle of the last century, 
and, in addition to a prosperous business house in Leaden- 
hall Street, established in 1766, with George Prescott, 
the banking house of Grote Prescott and Co. in Thread- 
needle Street. The eldest son of Andreas Grote by a 
second marriage was George Grote, the father of the his- 
torian. George Grote, the historian, was born in Novem- 
ber 1794. He had four years of education at a school in 
Sevenoaks, and six at the Charter house, before his father 
put him, at the age of sixteen, into the business of the 



242 OF ENGLISH LITERATUBE 

bank. He studied with energy in leisure hours, was up 
at six in the morning to read philosophy for three hours 
before breakfast. He had come into relation with James 
Mill, who not only strengthened his devotion to study, 
but also exercised strong influence over his opinions. 
Grote married in 1820 and began housekeeping next door 
to the bank in Threadneedle Street. James Mill dined 
with him there at least once a week, and a band of ear- 
nest intellectual workers gathered about him. There were 
meetings on two mornings a week at half past eight for 
study of philosophy. As early as 1823, he formed the 
design of writing a History of Greece and began to col- 
lect notes for it. In the following years, he was among 
those workers for advance of unrestricted education who 
gave the most effectual aid to the founding of the Uni- 
versity of London. In 1830 George Grote's father died. 
He then inherited the family estate in Lincolnshire and 
became head of the banking house. To the business of 
the bank he gave strictest attention, while the critical 
condition of public affairs interested him deeply, and the 
" History of Greece " grew under his hand. In 1832 his 
interest in Parliamentary Reform, Vote by Ballot, Repeal 
of the Corn Laws and of Taxes on Knowledge, Exten- 
sion of Education, and other great questions of the day, 
caused him to offer himself as candidate at the elections, 
and he was placed, in December, at the head of the poll 
in the election of members for the City of London. He 
then removed his home from Threadneedle Street. In 
1835 he was re-elected to Parliament, where he was among 
the chiefs of the philosophical Radical section, and moved 
annually for vote by Ballot. At the new Election after 
the accession of Victoria, he was elected again, by a small 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 243 

majority against the strongest Tory opposition. After the 
dissolution in 1841 he withdrew from parliamentary life, 
and in March 1846 he produced the first two volumes 
of his " History of Greece," of which the twelve volumes 
appeared during the course of the ten years from 1846 to 
1856. George Grote continued his Greek studies and, 
blending with them his studies of philosophy, planned 
large works upon Plato and Aristotle. In 1860 he pub- 
lished an Essay upon Plato's Doctrine of the Revolution 
of the Earth, and in 1865 appeared in three large vol- 
umes his study of " Plato, and other Companions of 
Socrates." The book abounds in acute analogies, is philo- 
sophical, but, considering the subject, drily so. The old 
discipline of James Mill had weakened in Grote some of 
the faculties required for apprehension of the spiritual 
side of Plato. He published in 1868 " a Review of John 
Stuart Mill's Examination of Sir William Hamilton's 
Philosophy," and was preparing his work on Aristotle 
when he died in 1871. The fragment of his Aristotle 
was edited after his death by his friends Professor Alex- 
ander Bain and Professor George Groom Robertson, and 
published in 1872. George Grote was successor to Lord 
Brougham as President of University College, and Vice 
Chancellor of the University of London. The chief Eng- 
lish historian of Greece, the acute critic of Plato, had 
taken his place among the foremost scholars of the age, 
by aptitude of mind and resolute self-education in hours 
stolen from rest, without help of training at a University, 
and with the hindrances of a commercial life about him. 
In personal character and manner Grote was, in his latter 
years, the type of the best form of oldfashioned courtesy ; 
its kindly dignity was graced by a sincerity that could be 



244 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

felt in every act and word. To the College over which 
he had presided he bequeathed endowment for a chair of 
Logic and Mental Philosophy, but on condition that it 
should be held only by a layman. 

John Bowring, born at Exeter in 1792, was another of 
the young friends of James Mill. He was especially a 
friend and follower of Jeremy Bentham, of whom James 
Mill was the leading disciple. When Bentham died, in 
1832, John Bowring was his literary executor. In 1823 
Jeremy Bentham resolved to establish at his own cost a 
journal that should make head against the Edinburgh and 
Quarterly Reviews by vigorous expression of the opinions 
of that body of thinkers who were becoming known as 
philosophical Radicals. James Mill was asked to edit it ; 
but he declined the office as incompatible with his appoint- 
ment in the India House. John Bowring, then a merchant 
in the city, and for the last two or three years a devoted 
follower of Bentham's, undertook to be editor. While 
the first number was being prepared, partnership was 
established with a writer, Henry Southern, who was at 
the same time preparing a literary Review, to be published 
by Longman. The two projects became one, and "the 
Westminster Review " was started under the two editors ; 
John Bowring taking the political. Southern the literary 
department. In the first number a declaration of faith 
was written by James Mill, in the form of an analysis of 
the British Constitution from the Radical point of view. 
He argued that the two great parties in the state repre- 
sented conflicts of opinion between two sections of the 
governing body, and that such conflicts involved no essen- 
tial sacrifice of the aristocratical predominance. He illus- 
trated this by the conduct of the Whig party as expressed 



IK THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 245 

by its organ "the Edinburgh Review," from which he 
quoted freely in support of his assertion that it coquetted 
with popular principles, and took care never to push home 
any argument that touched the power or interest of the 
governing classes. Because of this article, planned as the 
Radical's definition of the broad line by which he was 
separated from the Whig, Longman, as publisher of " the 
Edinburgh," refused to bring out "the Westminster." 
James jNIill then went to his own publisher, by whom the 
first number of " the Westminster Review " was issued in 
April 1824. A subsequent article, levelled against " the 
Quarterly Review," defined the line of separation between 
followers of Bentham and the Tories. 

Mr. Bowring, while editing " the Westminster Review," 
still continued to distinguish himself by metrical transla- 
tions from languages unknown to the greater number of 
his readers. In 1821-3 he began with two volumes of 
"Specimens of Russian Poetry," in 1824 followed " Bata- 
vian Anthology," and immediately afterwards "Ancient 
Poetry and Romances of Spain ; " in 1827 he published 
"Specimens of Polish Poets," in 1830 "Poetry of the 
Magyars ; " in 1832 " Bohemian and Cheskian Anthology." 
In the reign of Victoria his characteristic labour was to 
produce an edition, in eleven volumes, published in 1838- 
41, of the works of Jeremy Bentham. ]\Ir. Bowring was 
in Parliament, except a four years' interval, from 1835. to 
1849. In 1849 he became British Consul at Hong Kong, 
and Superintendent of Trade in China. He was knighted 
after his return, in 1853, and sent out again as Governor. 
He held also other diplomatic offices before his death in 
1872 at the age of 80. In 1859 he published a book on 
"the Kingdom and People of Siam." In 1866 he went 



246 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

back to his old work and published translations from the 
Hungarian poet Alexander Petofi, a lover of freedom 
whose first songs appeared in 1843, who was accepted by 
the Hungarians as a national poet, and in the contest 
against Austria and Russia went into the battle of Schass- 
burg in July 1849. He was then only twenty-six years 
old. After the battle Petofi was not to be found either 
among the survivors or among the dead. 

A song writer belongs also to the group of English 
authors upon whom we are now dwelling, altliough the 
times happily did not call upon him for war songs. Bryan 
Waller Procter was born in 1790. He was educated at 
Harrow, and made law his profession. In the years 1819- 
21 he acquired high reputation as a poet. In 1819 he 
published " Dramatic Scenes and other Poems ; " in 1820 
" A Sicilian Story " and " Marcian Colonna." In January 
1821 a tragedy by him, " Mirandola," was produced at 
Covent Garden, with Charles Kemble and Macready in its 
chief parts. The second act had been first written, then 
the first, and the end was known ; but while the poet was 
considering how to fill up the third and fourth with detail, 
his friend Macready sketched for him his notion of dra- 
matic incident. This Procter had to accept and work out, 
subject to criticism and alteration. " Mirandola " filled 
the house for nine nights and ran another seven, during 
which the public seceded to the other house to hear the 
singing of a lady who had been praised by George IV. 
The published play ran quickly through three editions. 
In 1822 Barry Cornwall maintained credit as a poet with 
"the Flood of Thessaly," and his Poetical Works were 
collected. His age then was thirty-two. In 1824 he mar- 
ried, worked at law to support his family, was called to 



m THE BEIGK OF VICTORIA. 247 

the bar, and afterwards was appointed a Commissioner in 
Lunacy. He held that office until 1861 and died in 
October 1874. Bryan Waller Procter used as author a 
name — Barry Cornwall — formed by anagram from his 
own, without the second syllable of Waller and the P. of 
his surname. The volume of " English Songs," by which 
he is most commonly known, was first published in 1832. 
A pleasant little pocket edition of them was published in 
1851, with pieces added, of which some then appeared for 
the first time. In the same year he published also " Essays 
and Tales in Prose." There was a new edition also of 
his Poetical Works in 1853. Procter's last work, published 
in 1866, when he was seventy-six years old, was a " Memoir 
of Charles Lamb," whom he had known in his youth. It 
was a short memoir written for the purpose of showing 
that Charles Lamb's life answered to the condition ex- 
pressed by Milton when he said, " I was confirmed in this 
opinion that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to 
write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to 
be a true poem." 

One of the daughters of Barry Cornwall, Adelaide 
Anne Procter, who was born in 1824 and died in 1864, 
has obtained a place among English poetesses. She pub- 
lished in 1858 " Legends and Lyrics, a Book of Verses," 
some of which had appeared in Charles Dickens's " House- 
hold Words." There was a second volume of " Legends 
and Lyrics " published in 1862, two years before their 
author's death ; and after her death the " Legends and 
Lyrics " were published in 1868 with a memoir by Charles 
Dickens of her short life of earnest thought and feeling. 

Another poet in our group of men who were between 
forty and fifty years old at the accession of Victoria was 



248 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Henry Hart Milman ; and lie, like Procter, began with 
success as a poet on the stage. He was born in February 
1791, the youngest son of a baronet who was physician to 
George IH. He was educated at Eton and Oxford. In 
1812 he obtained at Oxford the Newdigate prize for an 
English poem, his subject being " the Aj)ollo Belvidere." 
In 1815 he obtained a Fellowship at his College, Brase- 
nose, and also published a play, called " Fazio." In 1817 
he was appointed Vicar of St. Mary's Reading. In 1818 
he published a religious poem in twelve books, " Samor, 
Lord of the Bright City." In 1820 he returned to dra- 
matic poetry, and published "the Fall of Jerusalem," a 
play interspersed with lyric passages, and not meant for 
the stage. Its poetical view of the accomplishment of 
prophecy and of tlie great features of the Jewish nation- 
ality suggests a fitness in the sequence when the writer 
who sang as a young poet " the Fall of Jerusalem," told 
in after years " the History of the Jews." In 1821 Mil- 
man was made Professor of Poetry in the University of 
Oxford, and in that character he published in 1822 two 
new dramatic poems, " the Martyr of Antioch " and " Bel- 
shazzar." When Milman went to Reading, some of his 
congregation were exercised in mind by hearing that their 
new Vicar had written a stage play. From their point of 
view " the Fall of Jerusalem " had two merits, for its 
preface told them, that it was not for the stage, and that 
it set forth the fulfilment of prophecy. But there was 
set forth in it also human cause for the decline and fall of 
men and nations ; and the strength by which a mind true 
to itself can stand, was the poet's theme in " the Martyr 
of Antioch." The martyrologists, said Milman, dwelt 
almost exclusively on the outward and bodily sufferings 



IJSr THE REIGN OF VICTOBIA. 249 

of the early Christians ; but he shaped in his phay a tale 
of the triumph over inward suffering; surrender of life 
and the world where the world's wealth and happiness 
were in the sufferer's power, severing of ties that Chris- 
tianity endeared the more, a self-denial of the innocent 
affections ; " it was from such trials," said the poet, " not 
those of the fire and the stake alone, that the meek re- 
ligion of Christ came out triumphant." The last of Mil- 
man's plays Avas "Anne Boleyn," in 1826. It was in 1829 
that he first published his "History of the Jews," and 
showed in it a liberal scholarship that gave alarm to many 
who had been taught to put away their reason when they 
read the Bible. There was nothing in Milman's life or 
writing that did not, in the eyes of educated churchmen, 
harmonize with the best spirit and the true aims of the 
Church he served ; nor did he remain long subject to mis- 
apprehension. At the beginning of the reign of Victoria 
Milman had left Reading, and had been in London for 
two years as Canon of Westminster and Rector of St. 
Margaret's. In 1838-39 he published an edition of Gib- 
bon's History, with notes. This was followed in 1840 by 
his own " History of Christianity from the Birth of Christ 
to the Abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire," in 
three volumes. In 1849 he w^as made Dean of St. Paul's, 
and took his degree of Doctor of Divinity. In 1854-55 
appeared the six volumes of Dean Milman's " History of 
Latin Christianity, including that of the Popes to the 
Pontificate of Nicholas V." This continued his preceding 
work. In 1867, the year before his death, there was a 
new and revised edition of each of these histories ; that 
of Latin Christianity, being then the fourth, and extend- 
ing to nine volumes. In 1865 Dean Milman returned to 



250 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

his first love for dramatic poetry, and published, daintily 
adorned with little woodcuts from the antique, a trans- 
lation of the "Agamemnon" of ^schylus and of the 
" Bacchanals " of Euripides into English verse. He added 
translations of a considerable number of choice fragments 
from the lyric and later poets of Greece. They had all 
been made when he was Poetry Professor at Oxford. 
Being required to give his lectures — which were on the 
History of Greek Poetry — in Latin, he felt that many of 
the students would not follow readily, and chose, there- 
fore, to animate his work by interspersing his own English 
versions of passages selected for quotation. His Latin 
lectures he did not care to print, for Otfried Miiller's work 
had since been published and translated into English; 
but the translations from Greek poets he was not content 
to part with. He, therefore, in his ripe age, added what 
was necessary to transform copious selections from two 
Greek plays into complete translations of them, and gave 
the rest as it remained to him. This volume Milman pub- 
lished at the age of 75, and three years afterwards, in 
September 1868, he died. 

The Church of England had another poet of about Mil- 
man's age in John Keble, a clergyman's son, born in 1792 
at Fairford in Gloucestershire. Keble was educated by 
his father in his home until he went to Oxford, to his 
father's College, Corpus Christi. He became a Fellow of 
Oriel, and had high reputation in the University; was 
Tutor at Oriel for five years ; served twice as Public Ex- 
aminer, and once as Master of the Schools. But he gave 
up his University position to go home, after his mother's 
death, and help his father by doing the duty of two little 
curacies. At different times Keble had written, and still 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 251 

wrote, religious poems in which devotional and domestic 
feelings were associated with habitual reverence for ordi- 
nances of the Church. A poem had often been written 
on the occasion of some festival. Then came the sugges- 
tion that by adding more he might form a chain of de- 
votional pieces extending over all occasions of church 
worship throughout the Christian year. Under the name 
of " the Christian Year " this volume of verse was first 
published in 1827. From that time to this, no new book 
of religious verse produced in England has been so widely 
diffused. Within twenty-six years one hundred and eight 
thousand copies were sold in forty-three editions, and 
" The Christian Year " is still being reproduced in many 
forms from the cheap shilling edition to the luxurious and 
costly illustrated volume. The force of the book lies in 
its sincerit3^ Its music is the music of a well harmonized 
life ; the devotion is real ; the quiet sense of nature is 
real. There are no tricks of style, though there are no 
flashes of genius. Keble laid stress on the authority and 
customs of the Church, he was what in the language of 
party is called a High. Churchman ; but the true man, 
whichever his side and whatever his cause, belongs to all 
and is a help to all. In 1825, when a brother was able to 
take his place by the side of the old father who lived to 
be ninety, John Keble took a curacy at Hursley. In 1831, 
he was appointed, as Milman had been appointed in 1821, 
to the Poetry Professorship at Oxford, an office tenable 
for five years. In 1833 he was appointed to preach the 
Assize Sermon at St. Mary's. He then took for his theme 
"National Apostasy." Dr. Newman looked upon that 
sermon as the starting point of the great movement at 
Oxford, in which Newman himself had a chief part, for 



252 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the revival of English religion by the restoration of the 
power of the Church, a movement very different in kind 
from that begun at Oxford by Wesley in the eighteenth 
century but not less earnest in its purpose, nor, perhaps, 
less powerful in its effects. Keble returned to his quiet 
curacy. He was advanced in 1835 from the curacy to 
the vicarage of Hursley, and then married. He edited 
Hooker's Works, and wrote five numbers of the " Tracts 
for the Times " that were speeding the new religious 
movement at the beginning of the reign of Victoria. He 
edited at the beginning of the reign a "Library of the 
Fathers','' published Sermons at various times, in which 
he laid great stress upon Sacraments of the Church, and 
produced in 1847 another volume of poems "Lyra Inno- 
centium." These poems dealt with doctrines of the 
Church in association with the lives of children, whom he 
loved, though in his marriage he was childless. John 
Keble and his wife died in the same year 1866, the wife 
two months after the husband. 

Richard Whately, also a clergyman's son, who was at 
Oriel with Keble, but Avas five years older, became Fellow 
of Oriel in 1811. Like Keble, he remained at Oxford as a 
private tutor. His mind was vigorous and practical. In 
1819 he met the doubts of sceptics by an imitation of their 
style, applied to events still within living memory, in a 
pamphlet of " Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon." 
This was suggested, probably, by a pamphlet in which 
his tutor. Dr. Copleston (whose " Remains " he edited in 
1854), had treated with pleasant irony the destructive 
method of some literary critics by applying it to Milton's 
" L'Allegro " and " II Penseroso." In 1825 Whately, who 
had married and gone to a living in which his wife's health 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 253 

suffered, became Principal of St. Alban's Hall, and took 
the degree of D.D. In 1827 lie published " Elements of 
Logic ; " and '' Elements of Rhetoric," in 1828. From 1829 
to 1831 he was Professor of Political Economy at Oxford. 
In 1831 he was made Archbishop of Dublin, and that was 
his position at the beginning of the reign of Victoria. His 
influence, wherever he exerted it, was that of a shrewd, 
healthy, religious man, who battled against faction and in- 
tolerance, and sought to calm morbid excitement. He 
acted and spoke frankly and naturally, preached in a 
natural voice, and in his " Elements of Rhetoric " tried to 
persuade the clergy that the source of " clergyman's sore 
throat " was their not doing so. Two or three years after 
the Queen's accession he wrote to a friend, " I was at the 
Birthday Drawing-room yesterday, with the Bishop and 
address. The Queen reads beautifully ; I wish she would 
teach some of my clergy." In 1856 Whately edited 
Bacon's "Essays," with coj)ious comments upon life which 
they suggested to him. In 1859 he edited, with annota- 
tions, Paley's "Evidences" and Paley's "Moral Philoso- 
phy." Whately died in 1863. 

Richard Whately was one of the eldest, Thomas Arnold 
one of the youngest of this group of workers. Arnold 
was born in 1795, and was the youngest son of a collector 
of customs at West Cowes. When he was six years old, 
his father died. After four years at a school in Warmin- 
ster, he was sent, in 1807, at the age of twelve, to Winches- 
ter. In his sixteenth year, he won a scholarship at Corpus 
Christi College, Oxford. He obtained a Fellowship in 
1815 ; gained prizes in 1815 and 1817 for the two Univer- 
sity Essays in Latin and English ; delighted in studies of 
History; fastened on Thucydides, whom he afterwards 



254 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

edited; was earnest, ardent, lively as a boy. "When he 
went to see Keble in his new curacy at Hursley, Keble 
wrote of him, " Tom Arnold ran down here like a good 
neighbour, and surveyed the premises and the neighbour- 
hood presently after Christmas. How very unaltered he 
is, and how very comfortable and contented ! He is one 
of the persons whom it does one good to think of when I 
am in a grumbling vein." In 1819 Arnold settled with 
his mother, aunt, and sister, as partner with a brother-in- 
law, who established a school at Laleham near Staines, 
and undertook the preparation of young men for the 
Universities. There Thomas Arnold spent nine happy 
years, after the first of which he married. In 1827 the 
post of Head Master at Rugby was vacant. Arnold was 
the last to send in his testimonials. In one of them, from 
Dr. Hawkins, there was the prediction that if Mr. Arnold 
were elected at Rugby he would change the face of educa- 
tion throughout all the public schools in England. Mr. 
Arnold was elected, and every public schoolboy now has 
reason to be grateful for the fact. He took priest's orders, 
entered on his office in August 1828, proceeded to his 
degree of D.D., and, as Dr. Arnold of Rugby, took a 
place of his own in the story of the Nineteenth Century. 
He knew how to make religion a part of the citizenship 
of school, as he desired to see it become part of the citizen- 
ship of life. He laboured for years, and in the end suc- 
cessfully, against those weaknesses of boy life which in a 
public school may shape themselves, for want of a wise 
guidance — and had shaped themselves — into forms of 
evil, difficult to change. He looked especially to his sixth 
form boys, taught by himself, to be guides of opinion and 
public feeling, and he sought through them to put his 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 255 

own mind into all. In 1832 he bought for himself a 
home, for vacation use and future retirement, at Fox How 
between Rydal and Ambleside. Upon all strife of party 
in the church he looked with pain. In 1839 he wrote, 
" When I think of the Church I could sit down and pine 
and die." There was the fury of strife then that, in the 
early part of the reign of Victoria, had been stirred by 
the enthusiasm of those men who worked at Oxford for 
the restoration of religion by the re-establishment of 
Church authority over opinion. What Dr. Arnold sought 
was a practical union of the spirit of religion with all 
action of the state or of the single citizen. He desired to 
see all human action founded upon Christian principles, 
and opinion free. In this sense he said, " It is because I 
so earnestly desire the revival of the Church that I abhor 
the doctrine of the Priesthood." Dr. Arnold will be more 
widely remembered as a shaper of men than of books; 
but his sermons delivered to the boys in Rugby Chapel, 
and other sermons that made part of his labour to build 
citizens, were collected into volumes, and during that 
latter part of his life which fell within the reign of Vic- 
toria he published, between 1838 and 1843, his "History 
of Rome." Its last volume was posthumous. In 1841 he 
had accepted the duties of Regius Professor of Modern 
History at Oxford, and read his Inaugural Lecture in De- 
cember, to the especial delight of all Rugby boys who were 
then Oxford men. On the morning of Sunday, the 12th 
of June, Thomas Arnold died in his bed of unsuspected 
heart disease. His last act before he went to rest had been 
to make an entry in his diary. " The day after to-morrow 
is my birth-day, if I am permitted to live to see it — my 
forty-seventh birth-day since my birth. How large a por- 



25Q OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tion of my life on earth is already passed ! And then — 
what is to follow this life ? How visibly my outward work 
seems contracting and softening away into the gentler 
employments of old age ! In one sense, how nearly can I 
now say, ' Vixi ' ! " Then follows expression of a desire 
to do, if it might be, yet one thing. "But above all," 
he added, and these were his last written words, "let me 
mind my own personal work, — to keep myself pure, and 
zealous, and believing, — labouring to do God's will, yet 
not anxious that it should be done by me rather than by 
others, if God disapproves my doing it." 

Here ends the record of this band of workers like in 
age. And with such music in its fall, another wave 
breaks on the shore of time. 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 257 



CHAPTER X. 

OF THOMAS CAELYLE, AND OF DIVINES AND WITS. 

Annan river, flowing through Dumfriesshire from north 
to south, enters the Solway Firth when it has passed a 
mile or two beyond Annan town. Five or six miles to 
the north of Annan is the village of Ecclefechan — the 
Church of St. Fechan — where an open burn once flowed 
along its single street. On the 4th of August 1792 
Edward Irving was born near the old town cross of 
Annan, one of the eight children of Gavin Irving, a tan- 
ner. In an adjoining house, that had the same yard in 
common, was born one of Irving's earliest play-fellows, a 
boy about four year older than himself, who went to sea 
at thirteen, and afterwards became famous as Hugh Clap- 
perton, the African explorer. On the 4th of December 
1795 Thomas Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan. His 
father, James Carlyle, was a stonemason, belonging to a 
family described by one of their neighbours as "pithy, 
bitter-speaking bodies, and awfu' fechters." Carlyle him- 
self says they were noted "for their brotherly affection 
and coherence, for their hard sayings and hard strikings." 
James Carlyle was the steadiest and most prosperous of 
the family, though he never had more than three months 
of formal education. His first wife dying a year after 
marriage, he took for second wife Margaret Aitken, who 
had been a domestic servant, and who first learnt to use a 



258 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

pen in after years that she might be able to write to her 
son Thomas. In 1797 James Carlyle moved to a larger 
house, where other eight children were born. In 1806, 
when Thomas Carlyle's age was a little more than ten, his 
father took him to Annan School on a Whitsunday morn- 
ing. " I," says Carlyle, " trotting by his side in the way 
alluded to in Teufelsdrockh. It was a bright morning, 
and to me full of movement, of fluttering boundless hopes, 
saddened by parting with mother, with home, and with 
hopes which afterwards were cruelly disaj)pointed. He 
called once or twice in the grand schoolroom, as he 
chanced to have business at Annan ; once sat down by me 
(as the master was out) and asked whether I was all well. 
The boys did not laugh as I feared ; perhaps durst not. 
He was always generous to me in my school expenses; 
never by grudging look or word did he give me any pain. 
With a noble faith he launched me forth into a world 
which himself had never been permitted to visit." 

The schoolmaster was an Adam Hope, whose diligent 
use of the rod caused Carlyle, in " Sartor Resartus," to 
figure Annan school under the name of the Hinterschlag 
Gymnasium, as the burn at Ecclefechan, running to the 
Annan and the Solway Firth, was "the little Kuhbach, 
gushing kindly by, among beechrows, through river after 
river, to the Donau." Edward Irving also had been 
taught by Adam Hope, and had left for the Edinburgh 
University, when he was thirteen years old, a year before 
Carlyle's coming to Annan. "Old Adam," Carlyle wrote, 
"if you know the Annanites and him, will be curiously 
found visible there to this day ; an argumentative, clear- 
headed, sound-hearted, if rather conceited and contentious 
set of people, more given to intellectual pursuits than 
some of their neighbours." 



IJ^ TUE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 259 

At fourteen, Thomas Carlyle was sent to Edinburgh, 
walking from Ecclefechan with a companion who was 
about to enter on his second year. Carlyle's father and 
mother were devout members of the Burgher Secession 
Kirk at Ecclefechan. It assembled in a rude meeting- 
house, under the ministration of the Rev. John Johnston, 
a venerable man to whose sermons Adam Hope and the 
Burgher Seceders from Annan travelled every sabbath six 
miles out and six miles home. The hope of James and 
Margaret Carlyle was to see their eldest son in the pulpit, 
and it was a bitter disappointment to the father when the 
son found that he could not enter the church. Carlyle 
himself told of this time in answer to a question from Dr. 
Milburn, a blind preacher from America, who asked how 
he came by his dyspepsia : " The voice came to me, saying, 
' Arise and settle the problem of thy life I ' I had been 
destined by my father and my father's minister to be my- 
self a minister. But now that I had gained man's estate, 
I was not sure that I believed the doctrines of my father's 
kirk ; and it was needful I should now settle it. And so 
I entered into my chamber and closed the door, and 
around me there came a trooping throng of phantasms 
dire from the abysmal depths of nethermost perdition. 
Doubt, Fear, Unbelief, Mockery, and Scorn were there ; 
and I arose and wrestled with them in travail and agony 
of spirit. Whether I ate I know not ; whether I slept I 
know not ; I only know that when I came forth again it 
was with the direful persuasion that I was the miserable 
owner of a diabolical arrangement, called a stomach ; and 
I have never been free from that knowledge from that 
hour to this, and I suppose that I never shall be until I 
am laid away in my grave." 



260 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUUE 

Thomas Carlyle took no degree in Edinburgh. In the 
summer of 1814, when in his nineteenth year, and still 
looking to the pulpit as his aim in life, he obtained, by 
competition at Dumfries, the post of mathematical master 
in the Annan Academy, where he earned X60 or X70 a 
year. Thus he could relieve his father of expense while 
making the necessary appearances at Edinburgh as a 
divinity student. It was usual for the Scottish clerical 
students to earn by teaching, after their first session in 
the "Divinity Hall." Edward Irving, also a divinity 
student at Edinburgh, had in the same manner, at the age 
of eighteen, been appointed, on the recommendation of 
Dr. Christison, the Humanity Professor, and Sir John 
Leslie, the Professor of Mathematics, to a newly estab- 
lished Mathematical School at Haddington. 

Irving is described by a pupil as having then been " a 
tall, robust, handsome youth, cheerful and kindly dis- 
posed, who soon won the confidence of his advanced 
pupils, and was admitted into the best society in the town 
and neighbourhood." The chief surgeon of Haddington 
was Mr. John Welsh, with local rank as Dr. Welsh, who 
owned part of some land that had belonged to his ances- 
tors at Craigenputtock. He claimed descent from a 
famous John Welsh, Minister of Ayr, who married John 
Knox's youngest daughter. Dr. Welsh had an only 
daughter, Jane, whom he desired, since she was all he 
had, to educate as liberally as if she were a boy. Mrs. 
Welsh wished her to be educated as a girl, that is to say, 
left partly uneducated. Little Jane, hearing the discus- 
sions about herself, made up her own mind. Desiring to 
be educated as a boy, she worked secretly at Latin de- 
clensions, and broke, one evening, upon the discussion 



IN THE REIGJSr OF VICTORIA, 261 

between father and mother, by suddenly declming penna, 
pennre, from under the table. The triumphant father 
asked Sir John Leslie to send him from Edinburgh a 
sufficient tutor for so promising a child. Sir John replied 
that a sufficient tutor was already in Haddington. Ed- 
ward Irving was, therefore, engaged to give lessons every 
morning to Miss Jane Welsh, from six to eight o'clock, 
before his own work in the school began. In that way 
Irving first established life-long friendship with the Jane 
Welsh who became Mrs. Carlyle. 

Carlyle, in whom some characteristics of a family of 
" pithy, bitter-speaking bodies " blended with a sense of 
power and unsatisfied yearnings, frankly tells how jeal- 
ously he looked on Irving when he saw him first as an 
old boy of whom the Annan School was proud, returning 
flushed with successes from the University, and looking 
in on Adam Hope in schoolhours. It was so also when 
Carlyle saw him for the second time, fresh from his new 
Academy at Haddington, where "as to his schoolmaster 
successes," Carlyle wrote, " I cared little about that, and 
easily flung that out when it came across me. But nat- 
urally all this betrumpeting of Irving to me (in which I 
could sometimes trace some touch of malice to myself) 
had not awakened in me any love towards this victorious 
man." Of himself, as Mathematical Master at Annan, 
he said, " I Avas abundantly lonesome, uncomfortable, and 
out of place there. Didn't go and visit the people there. 
Ought to have pushed myself in a little silently, and 
sought invitations. Such their form of special politeness, 
which I was far too shy and proud to be able for." 

After two years at Haddington Irving obtained, through 
the good offices of Sir John Leslie, charge over a newly 



262 OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE 

established Academy in "the lang town of Kirkcaldy/' 
which stretched, little more than a thin line of street, a 
mile long, by the northern shore of the Firth of Forth. 
Irving's school-discipline was severe, beyond even the 
custom of the time ; but out of school he was the friend 
and comrade of his boys and girls. One of his pupils, 
Isabella Martin, eldest daughter of the parish minister at 
Kirkcaldy, afterwards became his wife. In 1815 Irving 
obtained his license to preach, and his first sermon was 
preached in his native town. But he remained for 
another three years schoolmaster at Kircaldy, depreciated, 
when he preached there, as a young man with "ower 
muckle gran'ner," too much grandeur. His severity 
caused a third or fourth part of the parents of his pupils 
to revolt against him. They determined to revive the 
parish school by buying off an effete schoolmaster, and 
applying again to Professors Christison and Leslie for a 
competent teacher. Thomas Carlyle was recommended. 
While that was being arranged, Irving again was in 
Annan, this time comforting old Adam Hope for the loss 
of his wife, and he met Carlyle engaged upon like duty. 
The complete unselfishness with which Irving welcomed 
Carlyle as one who was to be his neighbour, and offered to 
his proposed rival the use of his house while he was set- 
tling, conquered finally Carlyle's proud shyness. Carlyle 
went, and he says, " room for plenty of the vulgarest 
peddling feeling there was, and there must still have 
been between us, had either of us, especially had Irving, 
been of pedlar nature. And I can say there could be no 
two Kaisers, nor Charlemagne and Barbarossa, had they 
neighboured one another in the empire of Europe, been 
more completely rid of all that sordes, than were we two 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA, 263 

schoolmasters in the burgh of Kirkcaldy." Thomas Car- 
lyle, as schoolmaster at Kirkcaldy, was not less severe 
than Edward Irving ; but in the end of 1818 both Irving 
and Carlyle became weary of their work and left for Edin- 
burgh, each with a little money saved; Irving with 
several hundred, and Carlyle with about one hundred 
pounds. At Kirkcaldy Carlyle is said to have been little 
known, "being then, as afterwards, moody and retiring 
in his disposition." While there he spent some time on 
a translation of Legendre's Geometry, which was pub- 
lished in 1821, with an introductory essay on Proportion 
of which Professor De Morgan afterwards wrote that it 
was " as good a substitute for the fifth book of Euclid as 
could be given in speech, and quite enough to show that 
Carlyle would have been a distinguished teacher and 
thinker in first principles." 

In 1819 a letter from Irving represented his friend Car- 
lyle as going from Edinburgh to Ecclefechan, saying, "I 
have the ends of my thoughts to bring together, which no 
one can do in this thoughtless scene. I have my views of 
life to reform, and the whole plan of my conduct to new- 
model ; and withal I have my health to recover. And 
then once more I shall venture my bark upon the waters 
of this Avide realm, and if she cannot weather it, I shall 
steer west and try the waters of another world ! So," 
Irving wrote, "he reasons and resolves; but surely a 
worthier destiny awaits him than exile." Carlyle earned, 
from 1820 to 1823, by writing articles in Brewster's Edin- 
burgh Encyclopaedia and by other pen-work. His friend 
Irving had then begun enthusiastic labour among the 
poor under Chalmers at Glasgow. In 1823 Carlyle was 
introduced by Irving to his old pupil Jane Welsh, whose 



264 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

father was then dead, and had left to widow and daughter 
Craigenputtock with what other property he had. In 
that year Irving received his call from the Caledonian 
Chapel in London. In July he began his ministration in 
Cross Street, Hatton Garden. His tall figure, the spirit- 
ual face alight with enthusiasm, the dignity of earnest- 
ness, too real to be marred by a squint that he had from 
his birth, the grandeur of manner that had perplexed 
Kirkcaldy, and the frank goodness of Irving's whole 
nature, were felt by all who came under his influence. 
Wilkie, the painter, came to hear his countryman, and 
came again, bringing Sir Thomas Lawrence. Zachary 
Macaulay was impressed. Sir James Mackintosh, induced 
to look in, heard Irving pray for a family of orphans as 
now " thrown upon the fatherhood of God," and repeated 
the phrase to Canning. Canning at once engaged to go 
with Mackintosh to Irving's church on the following Sun- 
day. He did so. A few days afterwards something was 
said, in a debate on Church matters, about the necessary 
relation between high qualifications and high pay. Can- 
ning then told the House that he himself had lately 
heard a Scotch minister, trained in one of the most poorly 
endowed of churches, preach the most eloquent sermon 
he had ever listened to. This reference awakened public 
curiosity, and London " Society " was thenceforth set 
down in many carriages, Sunday after Sunday, at the 
small chapel in Cross Street, Hatton Garden. Irving had 
become one of the most praised and most abused of men, 
but kept his pure-hearted enthusiasm unstained, when he 
married, in October 1823, his old pupil. Miss Martin, the 
minister's daughter at Kirkcaldy. In that first year of 
his popularity, Irving again helped Thomas Carlyle. 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 265 

Finding a tutor wanted to prepare Charles Buller and his 
brother Arthur for College, Irving advised that Charles 
Buller should be sent to the University of Edinburgh, 
and placed under the tutorship of Carlyle. This was 
done, and Carlyle received £200 a year for his private 
teaching of a brilliant youth whose death, when he had 
risen to manhood with high promise of all usefulness, was 
followed by no tribute to his memory more eloquent and 
warm-hearted than that of Thomas Carlyle, which was 
published in " the Examiner " newspaper. 

Carlyle's pen-work was growing in importance when he 
had Charles Buller for a pupil. Still there was the unsat- 
isfied aspiration of a mind conscious of depths yet to be 
stirred. In 1823 Carlyle was impelled to some trials of 
verse, and in a " Tragedy of the Night Moth," who is too 
evidently a poetical poor cousin to Burns's "Mouse," he 

wrote : — 

Poor moth ! thy fate my own resembles : 

Me too a restless asking mmd 
Hath sent on far and weary rambles, 

To seek the good I ne'er shall find. 

Like thee, with common lot contented, 

With hmnble joys and vulgar fate, 
I might have lived and ne'er lamented, 

Moth of a larger size, a longer date. 

He had contributed a paper on Goethe's "Faust" to a 
"New Edinburgh Review," in 1822. The first part of 
his " Life of Schiller " was contributed to " the London 
Magazine," in October 1823, the rest appeared in the 
course of 1824, in which year he received X50 for his 
translation of Legendre, which was edited by Brewster. 
In the same year also he published his translation of 



266 OF ENGLISH LITERATUBE 

Goethe's " Wilhelm Meister," with a preface m which he 
expressed his wish to turn the English reader from a false 
and sentimental notion of the great poet of Germany, 
based on a misreading of " Faust," to a true sense of his 
large and healthy power. The translation, for which 
Carlyle received X180, was praised and abused until it 
obtained public attention. 

After the printing of " Wilhelm Meister," Carlyle came 
to London, in June 1824, staying as guest with his friend 
Irving for the first few weeks, and then taking rooms in 
Irving's neighbourhood. Irving's house was open to him 
as a brother's during his stay in London, which ended in 
March 1825. Li London, plagued with dyspepsia, Carlyle 
was teaching Charles BuUer, impatient of Mrs. Buller's 
changeful plans, until he finally advised that his pupil 
should be sent straight to Cambridge, and there placed 
under a Cambridge tutor. There was a little money now 
in hand, and in the next year, 1825, Carlyle received 
XlOO for the publication of the "Life of Schiller," in a 
volume. When contributed to the " Magazine," no pay- 
ment had been received for it. 

Li the next year, 1826, Thomas Carlyle married Jane 
Welsh. He was then thirty years old. One of the good 
friends he had made in London, Bryan Procter — " Barry 
Cornwall " — gave him a letter of introduction to Francis 
Jeffrey. Li the "Edinburgh Review" Jeffrey had pro- 
nounced the Life of Schiller " eminently absurd, puerile, 
incongruous and affected," but he had slipped towards the 
close of his review into "some feeling of mollification," 
and ended by finding the author to be "a person of 
talents." Armed with personal introduction, Carlyle 
faced Jeffrey in his study. Jeffrey had better insight 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 267 

into men than into books, and with aid of human inter- 
course he soon found Thomas Carlyle to be not merely " a 
person of talents " but a man of genius. He understood 
something of the struggle of the soul hungering for noble 
work, and not without that hunger also for a sympathetic 
answer from its fellows which gives to men of genius who 
live secluded lives their greed for fame. It is a yearning 
that has not one point in common with the shallow greed 
for notoriety in those who care more for themselves than 
for their thoughts. Jeffrey's kind heart was quickly 
moved to sympathy, and friendly relations were at once 
established. 

After much deliberation, Carlyle and his wife resolved 
to live upon the wife's little property at Craigenputtock, 
where the pen could be busy in earning, and the mind 
free to determine its true work in life. They went in 
May 1828, Carlyle then being thirty-two years old. Jef- 
frey promised to visit them, and did so. Articles in the 
"Edinburgh Review" became, from 1828 to 1831, one 
source of income. The first articles, written in 1828, 
were those on " Jean Paul Richter " and on " Burns." 
Some influence of Jean Paul Richter upon Carlyle's mind 
and style was manifest to the end, and no thoughtful 
reader of Carlyle's first article in "The Edinburgh." can 
fail to observe passages in which the writer hints uncon- 
sciously some lights and shades from his own mind as 
characteristics of Jean Paul. The sympathetic insight of 
genius was in Carlyle's paper upon Burns. 

In his first year at Craigenputtock Carlyle placed him- 
self in correspondence with Goethe, who wrote a preface 
to a German translation of his " Life of Schiller," and 
regarded him as the first Englishman who had found his 



268 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

way to the heart of German Literature. " Let me yet con- 
fess," he wrote to Goethe, in September 1828, " that I am 
uncertain about my future literary work, about which I 
shoukl be glad to get your opinion." Within easy reach of 
Edinburgh, but placed among granite hills and moorlands 
in what he called the loneliest spot in Britain, six miles 
from any person Avho might be disposed to call on him, 
Carlyle had freedom to work out the problem of his life, 
and with it the problem of the life of every man. In 1827 
he published " Specimens of German Romance." In Decem- 
ber 1829 he wrote to Jeffrey, "I have some thoughts of 
beginning to prophesy next year, if I prosper." Next year, 
at the age of thirty-four, between January and August, 1830, 
" Sartor Resartus " was written. All voices out of the depths 
of his own past and present life were there. Half disguis- 
ing the intensity of direct speech by uttering it from 
under the grotesque mask of the German Professor, God- 
born Devilsdung, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, who had written 
a book on Clothes Philosophy ; with poetic irony playing 
the humorous critic upon quotations from the Professor's 
book, which were utterances that came glowing from Car- 
lyle's own inmost soul ; he felt that he had struck at last 
the true note of his life. In the middle of August 1831 
he came to London with his book, to find a publisher. 
The book had been written to no pattern known in the 
trade. His wife followed him to London, in December, 
with the last letter written to him by his father. In 
January 1832, while he was still in London, his father 
died. Then he closed his door and wrote those recol- 
lections which form one section of the " Reminiscences " 
published after Thomas Carlyle's own death. "Thank 
Heaven," he wrote at the close, '' I know and have known 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 269 

what it is to be a son ; to love a father, as spirit can love 
spirit, God give me to live to my father's honour, and to 
His." 

Disappointed in London, Carljle after his return to 
Craigenputtock, in the spring of 1832, applied to Jeffrey 
— then Lord Advocate — for aid to the obtaining of an 
appointment as keeper of an Observatory then being 
established in Edinburgh. Jeffrey, whose kindness to 
Carlyle had led him to offer aid of XlOO a year to the 
Craigenputtock household, — an offer, of course, not ac- 
cepted — did not encourage this attempt to turn again 
from Literature to Mathematics. Carlyle battled on. In 
the years 1833—34, " Sartor Resartus " appeared as a series 
of articles in " Eraser's Magazine." In May 1834 Thomas 
Carlyle and his wife left Craigenputtock for London, and 
established themselves in the house that was Carlyle's 
home for the rest of his life, 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea. 
Thenceforward Carlyle's way was clear before him, though 
for some years difficult to tread. His next book was '' The 
French Revolution. A History," published in the first 
year of the Reign of Victoria ; and it was not until the 
following year 1838 that " Sartor Resartus " was published 
in England as a volume. 

Thomas Carlyle came to London in May 1834, and in 
December of the same year Edward Irving died, wasted 
by consumption. Advance of the disease was hastened 
by the trials of his later years. The fervour and the high 
aims, common to them both, that had brought Irving and 
Carlyle into early fellowship, had caused Irving to mag- 
nify his priestly office with intensity of zeal. If, like 
Carlyle, he chose rather to be master than disciple, his 
aspirations were not the less pure and sincere. He felt 



270 OF ENGLISH LITERATUBE 

as an Apostle Avlien, assisting Chalmers in Glasgow, he 
entered every poor room that he visited with a solemn 
" Peace be to this House." He felt as a Prophet when, 
at last, in 1831 the gifts lost through the little faith of 
men seemed to him to be recovered by disciples to whom 
he himself ministered, and he mistook the delusions of 
hysterical women for descent from Heaven of the gift of 
tongues that is spoken of in the 14th Chapter of the 1st 
Epistle to the Corinthians. There never was a more honest 
or, to most men, a more obvious delusion than this which 
made wreck of the life of Edward Irving. His loving 
ardent mind had sought to lead men out of darkness far 
into the light beyond the veil that shrouds the mysteries 
of God. In the hour of death it consoled him to think 
that he had triumphed by the restoration in some souls of 
living faith, and, as he lay wasted by sickness, he believed 
that in his hour of utmost weakness God was about miracu- 
lously to renew his faithful servant's strength. When the 
end came, his last words were " If I die, I die unto the 
Lord ; " and his strength was renewed, though not in this 
world. 

Irving's writings were collected, and his life told in 1862 
by Margaret Oliphant, a lady, born about the year 1818, 
who began her career as a novelist in 1849 with " Passages 
from the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland." In many sub- 
sequent novels among which may be named " Chronicles 
of Carlingford " and " Salem Chapel," Mrs. Oliphant has 
shown always a gentle spirit under a quick, womanly 
sense of life and character. She published also in 1870 a 
life of St. Francis of Assisi, and in 1876 a book on "the 
Makers of Florence : Dante, Giotto, Savonarola, and their 
City." 



12^ THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 271 

Thomas Carlyle, when he settled in London, had his 
intellectual way clear before him. He also sought, as 
every writer of foremost power has sought, and still seeks, 
in the reign of Victoria, to aid as he could in the work of 
citizen-building. He felt the lowness of the civilization yet 
attained by man, overstated it, and laboured throughout 
life to raise it. " Not what I have, but what I do, is my 
kingdom," he taught in " Sartor Resartus," and in every 
book written afterwards. Throuo^h the mere surroundinors 
of life, man's clothes, his wealth and house and land, his 
body's dress, and his soul's dress which the body is, straight 
through this to the life within, we must look if we wish to 
see ourselves, or know one another. That is the Clothes 
Philosophy. The life within, which is alone worth cherish- 
ing, owes all its health to action, and for the advance of the 
world by true citizen-building the one thing needful is, 
that each should live his own life worthily. While setting 
aside dogmatic theology, Carlyle, in "Sartor Resartus" 
and in every book that followed it, held fast to a faith in 
God and immortality, and made it his work as a writer to 
teach men to live vigorous lives : " Most true is it," he 
said, " as a wise man teaches us, tliat doubt of any sort 
cannot be removed except by Action. On which ground, 
too, let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain 
light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into 
day, lay this other precept also well to heart, which to me 
was of invaluable service : — Do the Duty which lies near- 
est thee, which thou knowest to be a Dut}^ The second 
duty will already have become clearer. May we not say, 
however, thai the hour of spiritual enfranchisement is even 
this? When your ideal world, wherein the whole man has 
been dimly struggling and inexpressibly languishing to 



272 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

work, becomes revealed and thrown open, and you discover 
with amazement enough, like the Lothario in Wilhelm 
Meister, that your America is here or nowhere. The situa- 
tion that has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied 
by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered actual 
wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere, is thy 
Ideal; work it out therefrom, believe, live, and be free. 
Fool ! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thy- 
self. Thy condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that 
same ideal out of. What matter whether such stuff be 
of this sort or that, so the form thou give it be heroic, be 
poetic ? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the 
actual, and criest bitterly to the Gods for a kingdom where- 
in to rule and create, know this of a truth, the thing thou 
seekest is already with thee, here or nowhere, couldst thou 
only see." 

Carlyle's way of thought, like that of all the foremost 
thinkers in England during the Reign of Victoria, is in 
some sense a product of the forces that produced the great 
upheaval described with all the fervour of his genius in 
his book on the French Revolution. Throughout his life 
Carlyle held by the great central truth, that real advance 
can be secured only by development of the individual. 
Like Wordsworth, he insisted upon universal education, 
and dwelt on it in the book on " Chartism " published in 
1839. His contempt for the blind action of the masses, 
and the inclination shown very distinctly in his '' Chart- 
ism," and in later books with growing force, for govern- 
ment of the brute herd by despotism of some man who 
really lives his life and works his will, may be taken as 
part of a strong insistance upon one great truth, the deep 
conviction of his life, that all his genius was spent in 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 273 

bringing home to others. His book " On Heroes, Hero- 
worship and the Heroic in History," published in 1841, 
was full of broadest sympathy with individual men, what- 
ever their type of thought, who had known themselves and 
the purpose of their lives, had worked their will, and risen 
high above the servile crowd of imitators who reproduce 
dead forms of life, and so are what Carlyle called "Apes 
of the Dead Sea." 

Carlyle knew and loved a man, whenever he came near 
enough to see him. His own father seemed the best of men, 
and his own wife the best of women. Of men in the past, 
whose deeds and motives he could scrutinize in the retire- 
ment of his study, and who thus yielded to his penetrating 
genius the secrets of their lives, he discerned the worthi- 
ness or worthlessness, and he took pleasure in the contem- 
plation of their strength. But the men who lived about 
him in the world, and who could be known only by free 
and equal intercourse outside the study, his shy self-con- 
scious spirit seldom came near enough to understand. Of 
them he was at home a " pithy, bitter-speaking body," best 
liking those of whom he knew the most, and full of a deli- 
cate kindness in his personal relations with them. The 
worthiness of his subject and the fidelity with which he 
reproduced Cromwell speaking his own thoughts in his 
own words, gave dignity to the study of Cromwell, simply 
entitled " Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches ; with 
Elucidations," which Carlyle published in 1845. His love 
for a friend, who was not a strong man but who yet sought 
honestly to work out his convictions, gives beauty as well 
as strength to Carlyle's "Life of John Sterling," pub- 
lished in 1851. Li 1848 Archdeacon Hare, to whom and 
to Carlyle Sterling had committed all discretion as to the 



274 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

editing of liis writings, had published John Steriing's 
Essays and Tales with a sketch of his life. Steriing had 
been ordained as a clergyman, had served the Church for 
a few months, but had been led, partly, no doubt, by his 
friend Carlyle, away from the fold of the Church to sim- 
ple love of God and faith in Him. Julius Hare, in no nar- 
row spirit, had discussed this feature in Sterling from a 
point of view within the Church, and Carlyle felt bound 
to tell the world his friend's life from another point of 
view. He showed him faithfully as " among the million 
little beautiful, once more a beautiful human soul ; whom 
I, among others, recognized and lovingly walked with, 
while the years and hours were." But Carlyle knew little 
of life among the million, who were therefore " little beau- 
tiful " for him. 

In 1858, 1862, and 1865 Carlyle published, by two vol- 
umes at a time, the six volumes of his " History of Fred- 
erick the Great," a work by which he again allied himself 
to German thought. He had been drawn towards Fred- 
erick by admiration of strong individual will. Subsequent 
events have shown that Frederick's work was the sliaping 
not only of a strong Prussia but through it of a strong 
United Germany, there was no want, therefore, of a right 
historic sense in giving fourteen years of work to such a 
theme. But Frederick was not another Cromwell, and 
Carlyle became more and more conscious of his hero's un- 
worthiness while still he was upholding him as type of the 
man of strong will who beats down all obstacles, achieves 
his own ends and controls the destinies of others. While 
Carlyle showed in this History his marvellous power at 
its height, there is no book of his that defines more clearly 
the limitations of his power, or more frequently chafes the 



IN THE BEIGJSr OF VICTOBIA. 275 

reader by the twists and wrenches given to our mother 
tongue. What had been a slight fault in the earlier books, 
caught from half imitation of Jean Paul and other Ger- 
man Writers by a secluded man of genius who wished to 
speak out of his own depths in his own way, became in 
the later books a vice of style. Young writers with their 
hearts kindled at the fire of Carlyle's genius, paid him, in 
the only possible way, the sincere flattery of imitation. 
They copied the faults of style which it required no genius 
to reproduce. Even now there is to be met with, here 
and there, a man of high and mature intellectual power 
who cannot altogether free his books from the trick caught 
in his youth through generous enthusiasm for books glow- 
ing with true eloquence. 

Carlyle's attention was fixed so exclusively on life 
within each Man, that he paid no regard at all to the 
National life as it may be said to exist within a People. 
His friend Joseph Mazzini, whose disposition was exactly 
opposite in this respect, had, of course, a quick eye for 
such deficiency. " Mr. Carlyle," said Mazzini, " com- 
prehends only the individual ; the true sense of the unity 
of the human race escapes him. He sympathizes with all 
men, but it is with the separate life of each, and not with 
their collective life. He readily looks at every man as the 
representative, the incarnation, in a manner, of an idea: 
he does not believe in a ' supreme idea,' represented pro- 
gressively by the development of mankind taken as a whole. 
. . . The great religious idea, the continued development 
of Humanity by a collective labour, according to an 
educational plan designed by Providence, finds but a fee- 
ble echo, or rather no echo at all, in his soul. . . . The 
nationality of Italy is in his eyes the glory of having pro- 



276 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

duced Dante and Christopher Columbus ; the nationality 
of Germany that of having given birth to Luther, to 
Goethe, and to others. The shadow thrown by these 
gigantic men appears to eclipse from his view every trace 
of the national thought of which these men were only the 
interpreters or prophets, and of the people, who alone are 
its depositary." 

It is so. But is it not enough for one man to uphold 
firmly throughout his life one vital truth ? The national 
thought was in Carlyle himself when he became one of 
its prophets. The French Revolution of which he de- 
scribed so powerfully the wild tumult of the lives that 
were involved in it, though he showed little knowledge of 
its meaning, by its failure taught us our own slower and 
surer way to the ideal of which it had dreamed. Along 
the path first shown to us by Wordsworth Carlyle followed 
unconsciousl}^, and all the stress he laid on the shaping 
of each single man, was simply such work as the time 
required. We build a strong wall with sound bricks, a 
strong state with sound citizens. It is no reproach to the 
brickmaker that he is not bricklayer as well. 

In 1833-34, when Carlyle's " Sartor Resartus " was first 
appearing in " Eraser's Magazine," there was quick move- 
ment in the University of Oxford towards use of the 
whole mechanism of the Church for aid in the lifting of 
the minds of men. There was one aim in men so different 
as Thomas Carlyle and John Henry Newman. Each said, 
Let us put a soul into our dead conventions and help men 
to live true lives to highest aims. John Henry Newman 
was born in 1801, the son of a banker in Lombard Street. 
He was educated at Ealing School and elected to a scholar- 
ship in Trinity College Oxford, when yet very young. 



IJSr THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA, 277 

He graduated with honours in 1820, and obtained a Fel- 
lowship at Oriel. Newman had, with keen shrewdness of 
wit, a poet's nature, and he has written some pieces of 
good religious verse. Keble's " Christian Year," published 
in 1827, quickened in him the belief that all the ancient 
forms and institutions of the Church, restored to their 
position of pure spiritual symbols, might cease to be dead 
traditions, and give aid- in revival of the dying fire within 
the souls of Churchmen. John Keble's sermon on " Na- 
tional Apostasy," in 1833, spread zeal for this revival of 
religion among many members of the Universit}^ John 
Henry Newman suggested the issue of a series of " Tracts 
for the Times " — some " Ad Clerum " and some " Ad Pop- 
ulum " — to spread abroad the desire for an escape from 
formalism by deepening the general sense of holiness and 
beauty in the rites and ordinances of the Church. The 
first Tract, sold for a penny, was addressed to the Clergy. 
It contained " Thoughts on the Ministerial Commission," 
which dwelt upon the Apostolical Succession of the Bish- 
ops, and sole priesthood of those whom bishops had 
ordained. At the close of the year 1833, Dr. Pusey, Re- 
gius Professor of Hebrew in the University, joined the 
movement. Edward Bouverie Pusey, born in 1800, had 
been educated at Christ Church, and had been elected to 
a Fellowship at Oriel. He became Regius Professor of 
Hebrew and Canon of Christ Church at the age of 28, 
and was thirty-three years old, Newman being thirty-two, 
when the movement began. It was in full force during 
the first years of the Reign of Victoria. 

The new Oxford movement was stoutly resisted, on the 
ground that the stress laid by it on priesthood and on 
strictness of ceremonial would cause many to find no 



278 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

stopping place until they entered the communion of the 
Church of Rome. That Dr. Newman himself, following 
the bent of a devout mind in the direction to which it 
inclined, did find his way into the Church of Rome, and 
is now the most distinguished of its Cardinals, has justi- 
fied this opinion. In February 1841, No. 90 of " Tracts 
for the Times," written by Dr. Newman, contained " Re- 
marks on Certain Passages in the Thirty-nine Articles," 
in which he argued that the pale of the Church of Eng- 
land was wide enough to contain him. But Dr. Newman 
owned afterwards that he argued against doubts rising 
within himself. In October 1845 he joined the Church of 
Rome. The followers of these new teachers were called 
" Puseyites " and have since been called " Ritualists " or 
High Churchmen, and they have always been a cause of 
great alarm to the large body of Englishmen who hold by 
the ancient dread of Rome, and still wish for a Church 
based upon the Bible with the least possible admixture 
of human traditions. It is the old contest of opinion, 
unchanged in spirit, or in the sincerity of combatants on 
either side, that runs through our History, and has left 
way-marks in the writings of Wiclif, in Pecock's "Re- 
pressor," in Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity," and many 
another earnest utterance. Opposite bias of mind in 
brothers equally earnest in desire to be true to their 
deepest convictions, has caused Francis Newman, who is 
four years younger than his brother, to quit the Church 
of England by a directly opposite door. His books pub- 
lished in 1849 and 1850, " the Soul, its Sorrows and Aspi- 
rations," and " Phases of Faith," showed depths of earnest 
feeling in expression of his doubts. Dr. Pusey's age was 
37, Dr. Newman's 36 at the beginning of the reign; his 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 279 

brother's 32, and thirty-two was the age of three other 
men active in Church questions, Samuel Wilberforce, 
Frederick Denison Maurice, and James Martineau. 

Samuel Wilberforce, third son of the famous combatant 
against slavery, beeame Bishop of Oxford in 1844, and 
was soon distinguished for his vigorous support of those 
who sought to put new life into religion, by strengthening 
the claims of the English Church upon allegiance of the 
people to the clergy, and allegiance of the clergy to its 
ancient ritual. Dr. Wilberforce, who was distinguished 
in society for many pleasant . qualities, was translated to 
Winchester in 1869, and died of a fall from his horse in 
1873. Asa writer he is best known by two small religious 
story books, published in 1840, which are among the best 
of their kind, "Rocky Island and other Parables," and 
" Agathos, and other Sunday Stories." 

Frederick Denison Maurice was with John Sterling as 
one of the pupils of Julius Charles Hare at Trinity Col- 
lege Cambridge. Julius Hare, with his brother Augustus, 
had published a volume of Thoughts called " Guesses at 
Truth " in 1827, the year after he was ordained. Maurice 
and Sterling became bound more closely together by mar- 
riage with two sisters. Julius Hare became Archdeacon 
of Lewes in 1840, married the sister of his friend Maurice 
in 1844, and died in 1855. Maurice, born in 1805, was 
the son of a Unitarian Minister. He qualified for his 
degree at Cambridge, but could not, in those days, take 
it, because he had scruples about subscription to the 39 
Articles of the Church of England. He came to London, 
studied law, and wrote in journals, till the beginning of 
1830, when he went to Oxford. There he was drawn into 
the Church of England as the Castle of Unity. He grad- 



280 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

uated, and was ordained in January 1833. His sympathj^ 
with Newman and his friends was destroyed by one of the 
" Tracts for the Times " in which Dr. Newman laid stress 
upon Baptism by the Church as a condition of Salvation. 
Maurice published a tract called " Subscription no Bond- 
age," in which the desire was expressed for a wide com- 
prehension of many forms of honest opinion within limits 
of the Church of England. Broad Church was the name 
given to those who laboured afterwards with Maurice, and 
with others like him, for a large freedom of intellectual 
opinion upon matters of dogma where there was one aspi- 
ration towards spiritual fellowship with Christ. Those 
who represented the old spirit of the Lollards and the 
Puritans, in dread of Romish ceremonial, and who derived 
from passages in the New Testament a code of doctrines 
which they taught as vital truths of the gospel, which 
they must believe who would be saved, were called I^ow 
Church or Evangelical. Few things have been more con- 
spicuous during the Reign of Victoria than the slow but 
constant advance towards a tolerance of the inevitable 
differences upon points dependent on the bias of opinion. 
The various communities of Christians, through the words 
and deeds of men like Frederick Maurice are every year 
being drawn nearer to one another in the bond of peace. 
Few would dread in 1881 such fair discussion by religious 
men as raised a storm over the *' Essays and Reviews " 
published in 1860, and the " Ecce Homo " of 1866. 

Maurice married in 1837, when he was chaplain to Guy's 
Hospital, and in 1838 set forth his view of a true Church 
in three volumes upon " The Kingdom of Christ." In 
May 1840 he was appointed Professor of English Litera- 
ture at King's College, London, and in 1846 Professor of 



IN THE EEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 281 

Ecclesiastical History there. In 1848 he was among the 
founders of the first College in England for the higher 
Education of Women, Queen's College in Harlej Street, 
of which he was the first Principal. For want of faith in 
Eternal Punishment shown in " Theological Essays," then 
published, Frederick Maurice was dismissed from his Pro- 
fessorship at King's College in 1853. In 1854, as the 
result of a movement which he had been guiding for some 
years, he established a Working Men's College in London. 
In 1866 he was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy 
in the University of Cambridge, for which he had proved 
his fitness by valuable books upon the history of Ancient, 
Mediaeval, and. Modern Philosophy published between 1850 
and 1862. Among. his directly religious writings some of 
the best are in the form of sermons delivered by him as 
Lecturer at Lincoln's Inn. He died in 1872. 

James Martineau, the foremost representative of those 
English Christians who openly repudiate the doctrine of 
the Trinity as formulated in the Athanasian creed, is a 
younger brother of Harriet Martineau. He was born in 
1805 at Norwich, educated at the Norwich Grammar 
School, at Dr. Lant Carpenter's school in Bristol, and at 
Manchester New College, York. From 1832 to 1857 he 
preached at Liverpool ; then, in London. In 1868 he 
became Principal of Manchester New College in London. 
In his " Endeavours after the Christian Life " published 
in two volumes, one in 1843 the other in 1847, the position 
is taken by which Dr. Martineau abides in all his writings. 
AVith a fine intellect and much grace of imagination to 
give life to his expression of deep, earnest thought, he also 
seeks the larger fellowship of Christians in a spiritual 
church. 



282 OF ENGLISH LITEEATUBE 

Again there is evidence of the difficulty, even within 
one household, of keeping earnest minds from following 
their own way in pursuit of truth. As George Herbert of 
old, one of the best and purest of what are now called 
"High Churchmen," had for his eldest brother a man who, 
in religious spirit, denied the existence of a special revela- 
tion either to the Jew or to the Christian ; as the brothers 
John Henr}^ Newman and Francis Newman went opposite 
ways ; so Harriet Martineau lost before death the faith 
in which she and her brother had been bred, but lost no 
part of her desire towards the highest life. 

In the earlier part of the Reign of Victoria, Miss Mar- 
tineau enriched its Literature with many earnest books. 
A novel on the story of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the slave 
who called his fellows into freedom and was crushed by 
the power of Napoleon, is called " The Hour and the Man." 
Wordsworth had written a sonnet on the fate of Toussaint 
L'Ouverture, and Miss Martineau's novel was written 
with as generous a sympathy. Her preceding novel, 
" Deerbrook," published in 1839, paints English domestic 
life, with the unobtrusive spirit of duty that sustains its 
charm. Among many good short stories of Miss Mar- 
tineau's may be named " the Billow and the Rock," pub- 
lished in 1846. A more laborious enterprise, conceived 
and undertaken as an aid to the diffusion of a right sense 
of what makes the strength of nations, was her " History 
of the Thirty Years' Peace, 1816-46," a work planned and 
begun by Charles Knight but mainly written by Miss 
Martineau. The book was published in 1850. In 1853 
Miss Martineau published a digest of Comte's Positive 
Philosophy. Such books as '* Household Education" in 
1849, and " Health, Husbandry and Handicraft " in 1861, 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 283 

indicated her continued interest in the advance of knowl- 
edge among the people. She died in June 1876. 

To the group of writers who were between thirty and 
fort}^ years old at the accession of Victoria belongs also 
Edwin Chadwick, who was of the same age as Harriet 
Martineau. He was in his early life one of the friends of 
Jeremy Bentham, and began his career as a writer in " the 
Westminster RevicAV " in 1828. Mr. Chadwick has spent 
a long life in strenuous labour for the well-being of the 
people, and is working still. He has given the most direct 
aid to Poor Law Administration ; to the relief of children 
from undue labour in the Factories, and to the education 
of Factory children ; to the advance of Public Education 
generally, and to the advance of Public Health. He was 
among the first to turn the public mind to questions of 
sanitary reform. 

The two wittiest men of this group, Thomas Hood and 
Douglas Jerrold, gave also their best energy to the en- 
deavour to reduce the evil done by man to man. Thomas 
Hood, born in May 1799, w^as the son of a London book- 
seller and publisher, of the firm of Vernor, Hood and 
Sharpe, in the Poultry. His mother was sister to an 
engraver and, after some education at a Clapham school, 
Hood was apprenticed to his uncle. The health of all the 
family was delicate. Father and elder brother died while 
Thomas Hood was very young, then followed the mother, 
and a sister, whose deathbed is the subject of her brother's 
touching poem '' We watched her breathing through the 
night." , 

The delicate health of Hood himself compelled him to 
give up work as an engraver. Li 1821 he w^as at work 
for the " London Magazine," and in 1824 he married a 



284 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

sister of John Hamilton Reynolds, one of his fellow-con- 
tributors. He joined his brother-in-law in 1825 in pro- 
ducing " Odes and Addresses to Great People," which 
attained great popularity. Two series of "Whims and 
Oddities " followed in 1826 and 1827, and in 1827 Hood 
showed his grace as a serious poet in a volume containing 
"the Plea of the Midsummer Fairies" and other pieces. 
In 1829 Hood published, in an annual called " the Gem," 
the most powerful of his serious poems, "the Dream of 
Eugene Aram." At Christmas 1830, he produced the 
first volume of his " Comic Annual." The kindliest wit 
and satire, jokes poured out incessantly from pen and 
pencil, supplied the needs of Hood's household, while in 
himself consumption was not slowly advancing. In 1834, 
the failure of a firm brought heavy loss upon him ; his 
health also became worse, and he went abroad. In 1835 
a son was born, Thomas Hood the younger, who died in 
1874, and within his short life of forty years maintained, 
after his father's death, by genial wit as a comic writer, 
pleasant associations with an honoured name. In the 
beginning of the present reign Thomas Hood, the father, 
39 years old, was quitting Coblentz for Ostend, disease 
advancing rapidly. He continued "the Comic Annual" 
as a sure source of income ; published " Hood's Own ; " 
and suggested a grim epitaph for himself, " Here lies one 
who spat more blood and made more puns than any other 
man." His " Up the Rhine," published in 1839, was very 
successful, but troubles with publishers clouded his suc- 
cess. In 1840 he returned to London, and had still to 
earn by his wit. He wrote for Theodore Hook in " the 
New Monthly Magazine," and upon Hook's death, in 1841, 
became editor, with a salary of X300 a year, apart from 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTOBIA. 285 

payment for the articles he wrote. At this time " Punch " 
was established, and a little poem by Thomas Hood call- 
ing for sympathy with the poor women ground down by 
employers of their labour with the needle, — a poem as 
pathetic as his '' Bridge of Sighs," — stirred all England 
in 1843. Hood cared more for the success of this appeal 
to humanity against " what man has made of man " than 
for all his wit besides, and asked that it might be written 
over his grave " He sang ' the Song of the Shirt.' " In 
January 1844 he left " the New Monthly " and established 
a Magazine of his own, '' Hood's Magazine." In June 
1844 Sir Robert Peel, in his own gracious way that 
doubled the value of such kindnesses, secured to Mrs. 
Hood a pension of £100 from the Civil List, that the poet 
might die with one earthly care the less. He died on the 
3d of May 1845. From Theodore Hook to Thomas Hood 
was a stride forward in civilization ; for it was not in Hood 
only that English wit took the i>ew way of the time and 
laboured for the uplifting of the fallen. 

Douglas William Jerrold was born on the 3d of Janu- 
ary, 1803, son of an elderly strolling actor by his young- 
second wife. When he was four years old, his father 
managed a theatre at Sheerness, and he acted when a child 
was needed on the stage. He was sent to a school at 
Sheerness where he was one of a hundred boys. He was 
handsome, white-haired, rosy cheeked, a great reader; 
" the only athletic sport I ever mastered," he said, " was 
backgammon." In 1813, when he was ten years old, 
Douglas Jerrold volunteered as midshipman on board His 
Majesty's guardship " the Namur," lying in the Nore. In 
1815, when a little more than twelve years old, he was 
transferred to the brig " Ernest," which brought in July 



286 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

to Sheerness a cargo of men wounded in battle. In the 
following October, Jerrold's experience as a sailor ended. 
The war was over ; the Sheerness theatre had lived by it ; 
Jerrold's father failed, and the family removed to London, 
where, in 1816, Douglas Jerrold was apprenticed to a 
printer. In 1818, at fifteen years old, he wrote a farce 
which was acted in 1819, at Sadlers' Wells, as "More 
Frightened than Hurt." This farce was translated into 
French, and afterwards returned to the English stage as a 
translation from the French under the name of " Fighting 
by Proxy," with Liston in its chief character. In 1823, 
young Jerrold, twenty years old, shared Byron's enthusi- 
asm for the cause of Greece. He was then writing dra- 
matic criticism in a paper published by the printer whom 
he served, and also writing plays for minor theatres, " the 
Smoked Miser " among them. In 1824, aged 21, he mar- 
ried. Between 1825 and 1829 he was writing pieces for 
the Coburg and Sadlers' Wells theatres, and for Vauxhall. 
In 1829, he was engaged by Elliston the actor, then man- 
aging the Surrey Theatre, as Dramatic Writer at a salary 
of five pounds a week. In that capacity, at the age of 
twenty-six, he at once gave the manager a prize in 
" Black-Eyed Susan." This was produced on Whitmon- 
day 1829, with T. P. Cooke as William. All London 
came to see it ; and when fashionable London objected to 
cross the Thames, T. P. Cooke was engaged to play in 
*' Black-Eyed Susan " every evening at Drury Lane after 
it had been acted at the Surrey. The piece produced 
thousands for others, but for its author only seventy 
pounds. Jerrold himself laid no false emphasis on this 
success. " Why, Douglas," said a friend, " you will be a 
Surrey Shakespeare!" "A sorry Shakespeare," he re- 
plied. 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 287 

Activity in playwriting was doubled, for Jerrold now 
was in request at all the theatres. In 1835 he had four 
plays being acted at four London theatres, while doing 
day work as subeditor of " the Examiner," and writing for 
"the Monthly Magazine." In April 1835 he began to 
write for " Blackwood's Magazine " and for the news- 
papers. In this year, loss through default of a friend, 
whom he had helped too generously, brought Jerrold into 
difficulty, and he wintered in Paris. In that winter of 
1835, Thackeray also was in Paris. Jerrold and he be- 
came acquainted, and when Jerrold republished selections 
from his paj)ers in "Blackwood" and the "New Monthly," 
as "Men of Character," in 1838, Thackeray furnished 
l^ictures to them. In 1840 Douglas Jerrold edited 
" Heads of the People," a series of -pen sketches by the 
ai;tist, Kenny Meadows, with written characters by Jer- 
rold, Thackeray, Laman Blanchard, and others. 

In 1841, when Jerrold was at Boulogne, his friend 
Henry Ma3diew had projected a weekly comic paper to be 
called " Punch, or the London Charivari." Mark Lemon, 
Gilbert Abbot a Beckett, and Stirling Coyne were among 
the company who joined most actively in its production, 
and the first number appeared on the 17th of July 1841. 
Jerrold was asked to join, and his first contribution ap- 
peared in the second number. Mark Lemon, born in 
1809, was at first joint-editor. He was then, like Jerrold, 
a busy dramatist. Henry Mayhew (born in 1812, and 
best known for his books based on direct inquiry into the 
condition of "London Labour and the London Poor," 
1851), presently retired from "Punch." Mark Lemon 
became, and remained until his death in 1870, the sole 
editor. Mark Lemon was admirably fitted for the post, 



288 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

with a mind broad as his body — he could play Falstaff 
without stuffing — a genial nature, good sense, and no 
tendency whatever to look on himself as chief contributor, 
he never lost sight of Douglas Jerrold's warning that he 
and his staff must spend their wit in aid of the real inter- 
ests of life. For the remaining sixteen years of his life, 
Jerrold's writings associated in " Punch " the keenest wit 
with care for all that was worthiest in life ; he aided every 
labour for the raising of society, and lashed with his satire 
all the vices and the vanities by which it is degraded. 
The light humour of Thackeray took part in the same 
war. Maginn joined. Hood contributed his " Song of 
the Shirt." Shirley Brooks, full of kindly courtesies, 
graced wit and humour with the good taste that directed 
all his work. Tom Taylor's love of Literature tinged his 
frequent verse with pleasant recollections of the poets. 
Year after year in " Punch " the wit was keen, the humour 
true. Artists of high mark, Richard Doyle, John Leech, 
and others, held their ground beside the writers, and the 
wits were among foremost combatants in the great battle 
of life. John Tenniel set aside other ambition and made 
a place of his own in the History of Art as producer, 
week after week, of cartoons, in which one of the best 
English artists is still joiiimg wit of invention to a sus- 
tained worthiness of purpose. 

Upon Mark Lemon's death, in 1870, Charles Shirley 
Brooks succeeded him as Editor of " Punch." His kindly 
wit was spent in its service until his death in 1874. He 
was born in 1815, and left training for the law to write 
plays ; reported also to '' the Morning Chronicle " on the 
condition of the peasantry in southern Russia. He wrote 
also some good novels. Tom Taylor, the next editor of 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA, 289 

" Punch," was born at Sunderland in 1817. He was edu- 
cated at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College, 
Cambridge, and called to the bar of the Inner Temple in 
1845. In 1850 he was appointed Assistant Secretary, and 
in 1854 Secretary, to the Board of Health, which office he 
held at the time of his death in July 1880. Tom Taylor 
also held the office of Professor of English Literature at 
University College from 1844 to 1847. He was the most 
successful dramatist of his time. The greater number of 
his pieces were original. He showed skill in adapting 
them to the powers of the actors by whom they were to 
be represented, and they cover the whole range of expres- 
sion, from pathos to the broadest farce. With his love of 
Literature was associated love of art, and he was well 
known among the painters as a genial and cultivated critic 
of their work in columns of "the Times." Among his 
books is one, published in 1865, on the " Life and Times 
of Sir Joshua Reynolds : with Notices of some of his 
Contemporaries, commenced by Charles Robert Leslie, 
R. A., continued and concluded by Tom Taylor." Tom 
Taylor's successor in the editing of Punch is Francis 
Cowley Burnand, born in 1837, and educated at Eton and 
Trinity College Cambridge. He also has been a very suc- 
cessful writer for the stage, and must already have made, 
with unfailing good humour, more jokes than Thomas 
Hood, although he has not written a " Bridge of Sighs " 
or a " Song of the Shirt." 

In the spirit that Douglas Jerrold put into " Punch " he 
wrote for it until within ten days of his death. In 1844 
he contributed to it " Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures," 
followed by " Punch's Complete Letter Writer." In 1843 
he founded and edited '' the Illuminated Magazine," which 



290 OF ENGLISH LITEEATUBE 

lived two years, and contributed to it "Chronicles of 
Clovernook." In 1845 followed Douglas Jerrold's " Shil- 
ling Magazine," in which he wrote "St. Giles and St. 
James," showing with all his wit and earnestness " what 
man has made of man." In 1851 he followed the way of 
publishing a novel in monthly numbers, which had been 
established by the success of Pickwick, in " the Man made 
of Money," a pleasant working out of the fancy that a man 
really made of money, who could peel at will a banknote 
from his person, would not be suffered to grow stout in 
this world of ours, as we have made it. In 1852, Jerrold's 
position, as a foremost wit who had throughout his life 
been labouring for the advancement of the people, caused 
an offer to be made to him of a thousand a year for his 
services as editor of a penny newspaper " Lloyd's Weekly 
News," designed for widest diffusion. He accepted that 
trust, and made worthy use of his opportunity. Douglas 
Jerrold died in June 1857 leaving, like Hood, a son behind 
him to maintain in Literature the credit of his name. His 
flashes of social wit are still remembered and told again. 
The sharpest sayings were those levelled in good humour 
at friends who knew the kind heart underneath the play- 
ful malice, for Jerrold was essentially gentle and high- 
minded. To the young men who gathered about him in 
his home, he would quote often for kindly encouragement 
Wordsworth's wise phrase : " ' Plain living and high think- 
ing,' " he would say ; " make that your motto." 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA, 291 



CHAPTER XL 

ONWARD BATTLE. 

Of Carlyle's articles in the "Edinburgh Review" 
Macaulay wrote to the Editor, "As to Carlyle, he might 
as well write in Irving's unknown tongue at once." Car- 
lyle's insight into Macaulay was implied once in his advice 
to an invalid, to read "the last volume of Macaulay's 
History, or any other new novel." The great charm of 
Macaulay's writing lies, indeed, in a faculty akin to that 
of the novelist. The following passage is from a journal 
kept by his sister Margaret, " I said that I was surprised 
at the great accuracy of his information, considering how 
desultory his reading had been. ' My accuracy as to facts,' 
he said, 'I owe to a cause which many men would not 
confess. It is due to my love of castle building. The 
past is in my mind soon constructed into a romance. . . . 
Precision in dates, the day or hour in which a man was 
born or died, becomes absolutely necessary. A slight 
fact, a sentence, a word, are of importance in my romance. 
Pepys's Diary formed almost inexhaustible food for my 
fancy. I seem to know every inch of Whitehall. I go in 
at Hans Holbein's gate, and come out through the matted 
gallery.' " This habit of realizing history to his imagi- 
nation, which jNIacaulay had from childhood and which 
strengthened with use, was aided by the absence of all 
qualities that could have interfered with it. He had no 



292 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

depths, except his depths of home affection in a genial, 
happy honest nature. He read eagerly, remembered easily, 
wove together pieces of his reading with rare cleverness 
into clear conceptions, till he saw in his own mind men 
of the past living and acting, almost heard them speak ; 
and then he reproduced his own perceptions in words 
that required no thinking to understand. Beyond this, it 
might almost be said that Macaulay did not think. Lights 
and shades of truth, reservations, subtle questionings, per- 
ceptions of the mysteries of life in men and nations, never 
troubled him. He read pamphlets by the thousand to 
produce his history ; he made the most careful inquiries 
upon little points that must be cleared up to secure full 
sense of lifelike movement to his narrative ; and thus it 
is no dead picture that he paints. There must be an 
undying charm in work so done by such a man ; never- 
theless its strength lies in the quality that caused Carlyle 
to recommend to an invalid " the last volume of Macau- 
lay's History, or any other novel." If the stream ran 
clear it was shallow, and to the multitude the History 
was good because it put scenes of life into their minds 
without requiring them to think much as they read. The 
view taken of any man or incident was habitually that 
which accorded with the writer's predilections and which 
could most readily take shape in his own imagination. 
Complaints founded upon the historian's misreading of 
facts were many. In 1861 Mr. John Paget gathered five 
of the most conspicuous into a book called "the New 
Examen," after Roger North's " Examen " of White Ken- 
nett's History. 

Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," published in 
1842, are full of the life and heat of the old ballad style, 



IN THE BmGI^ OF VICTOBIA. 293 

true ballads, with quick perception, clear realization, a 
full sweep of animated verse accordant to each story ; 
and they are all story, as they ought to be. In 1843 
Macaulay's Essays in the Edinburgh Review were repub- 
lished by himself. In July 1847, after a dissolution of 
Parliament, Macaulay was rejected at Edinburgh for his 
generous advocacy of a grant to the Irish Roman Catholic 
College at Maynooth. He had been giving divided alle- 
giance to Politics and Literature, but he now resolved to 
make a pure pursuit of Literature the pleasure and the 
duty of his life. He expressed his feeling in some lines 
written on the night of the defeat, in which he pictured 
the Fairy Queens of Gain, Fashion and Power visiting 
him, as he lay newborn in his cradle at Rothley Temple, 
and passing by Avith scorn ; but dwelt on the blessing of the 
glorious Lady with the eyes of light and laurels on her 
brow. It is the most thoughtful and real of all Macau- 
lay's pieces of verse, and has great interest as genuine 
expression — marred only by two rhetorical stanzas about 
"Thule's winter" and "the tiger's lair" — of deep and 
noble feeling at a turning point of life. The conception 
of the poem is based upon memory of a piece by his old 
friend Praed, entitled " Childhood and his Visitors." In 
1848 appeared the first two volumes of Macaulay's " His- 
tory of England from the Accession of James II." Its 
success was enormous and immediate. In July 1852 
Macaulay was re-elected for Edinburgh. Towards the 
close of 1855 the third and fourth volumes of the History 
appeared. A cheque for £20,000 represented his share 
of the profits of the History in 1856. In August 1857 
he accepted the offer of a peerage and became Baron 
Macaulay of Rothley. He died on the 28th of December 



294 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

1859, leaving a fifth volume of the History to be pub- 
lished after his death. The affection he inspired colours 
delightfully the sketch of Lord Macaulay's Life published 
in 1876 by his nephew, George Otto Trevelyan. This is, 
indeed, one of the best biographies to be found in the 
Literature of the present reign. 

Thomas Love Peacock, who was born in 1785 and died 
in 1866, was in his earlier years a friend of Shelley's, and 
obtained in 1818 an appointment in the India House. He 
left verse-writing for pure fiction, beginning with " Head- 
long Hall " in 1816. After long rest upon a reputation 
for his wit and fancy as a satirist, he produced " Gryll 
Grange " in 1861, at the age of 76, and published in the 
following year a translation of " Gl' Ligannati," a Comedy 
performed at Siena in 1531, which had been cited in 1602 
for its resemblance to Shakespeare's " Twelfth Night." 

The novelists between thirty and forty years old at 
the beginning of the reign were — Robert Bell and Cath- 
erine Crowe, 37 ; Charles Lever, 34 ; Benjamin Disraeli, 
33 ; William Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Lytton 
Bulwer, 32; Samuel Warren, 31. Robert Bell, born at 
Cork in 1800, came to London in 1828 after editing a 
newspaper in Dublin, and until his death in 1867 worked 
in London to good purpose as an energetic man of letters. 
He began by editing a paper called " the Atlas," and gave 
it a distinctly literary tone. He afterwards edited other 
journals, wrote for " Lardner's Cyclopaedia " several vol- 
umes of History and Biography, wrote three Comedies, 
"Marriage" in 1842, ''Mother and Daughter" in 1844, 
and "Temper" in 1845; two novels, "The Ladder of 
Gold " in 1850, and " Hearts and Altars " in 1852 ; and 
a " Life of Canning " in 1846. He also planned and exe- 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTOllIA. 295 

cuted an '' Annotated Edition of the English Poets " in 
half crown volumes, well printed upon good paper, each 
poet's works being prefaced with a biographical and 
critical introduction and interpreted throughout, where 
necessary, by free annotation. This enterprise was begun 
in 1854, long before the conception of the admirable 
" Globe " editions through which Messrs. Macmillan pub- 
lish their well edited cheap volumes of the English clas- 
sics. Robert Bell lived the vigorous and healthy life of 
a true man of letters who left the world something the 
better for his having lived in it. 

Catherine Crowe was born in 1800, and as Catherine 
Stevens married Lieut. Colonel Crowe in 1822. She 
began work as a writer in 1838, with a published tragedy, 
" Aristodemus." As novelist she made her first success 
with "Susan Hopley," since turned into a melodrama 
that has won much favour on the stage. " Lily Dawson " 
followed in 1847 ; next year she translated " the Seeress 
of Prevorst," and, turning to studies of the supernatural 
in wdiich her fancy took delight, she produced in 1848 
"the Nightside of Nature." In subsequent books Mrs. 
Crowe followed, but not exclusively, this path of fancy, 
and she died in 1876. 

Charles James Lever, born in Dublin in 1806, took the 
degree of Bachelor of Medicine in Trinity College Dub- 
lin, and of Doctor of Medicine at Gottingen. In the first 
year of the reign of Victoria he began to write in " the 
Dublin University Magazine " an Irish novel, full of high 
spirits and suggestions of practical jokes, called "the 
Confessions of Harry Lorrequer." Lever was for three 
years physician to the British Embassy at Brussels, and 
held that office when he produced his next novel " Charles 



296 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

O'Malley, the Irish Dragoon " in 1841. From 1842 until 
1845 he edited the Magazine in which he had made his 
first success. Afterwards he held various posts abroad, 
and poured out novel after novel, well flavoured with 
dashing military adventure and Irish fun. He died at 
Trieste in 1872. 

Benjamin Disraeli, born on the 21st of December, 1804, 
son of Isaac D'Israeli who wrote the " Curiosities of Liter- 
ature," died Earl of Beaconsfield in April 1881, after 
shaping for himself, by the vigour of his own genius, as 
leader of one of the two great parties in the state, a large 
i:)lace in the History of England. Political satire abounds 
in his novels, of which the earliest, read by the light of 
his later achievements, shadow forth some of the dreams 
that grew to substance as he grew to power. His first 
novel " Vivian Grey " appeared in 1826 ; " Captain Pop- 
anilla " followed in 1828. Then came " the Young Duke ; " 
"Contarini Fleming;" "Alroy;" and in 1834 "the 
Revolutionary Epic." In the present reign his chief 
novels were " Henrietta Temple " and " Venetia," 1837 ; 
"Coningsby," 1844; "Sybil," 1845; " Tancred," 1847; 
"Lothair," in 1870 and " Endymion," in 1880. He pub- 
lished also a tragedy, " Count Alarcos," in 1839, a " Politi- 
cal Biography of Lord George Bentinck," in 1852, and 
edited his father's works in 1858. 

William Harrison Ainsworth, eldest son of a Manchester 
lawyer, was born in 1805, educated at the Manchester 
Grammar School, and at first bred to the law. He pub- 
lished a Romance, " Sir John Chiverton," before he was 
of age, married at 21 a publisher's daughter, and made 
Literature his one profession after the success of his novel 
of " Rookwood," published in 1834. " Crichton " followed 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTOBIA. 297 

in 1837, and at the beginning of the Reign Ainsworth had 
taken his position firmly as a novelist. In 1840 he suc- 
ceeded Charles Dickens as editor of "Bentley's Miscel- 
lany," owing that position to the great success of his novel 
of " Jack Sheppard," which began to appear in the Miscel- 
lan}- in January 1839, with illustrations by George Cruik- 
shank. The novelist was hardly ansAverable for the 
manner in which his work was dramatised for most of the 
minor theatres, and received in that form by the ignorant. 
It was said of his book that it made house-breakers, as it 
was said of Schiller's first play that it made robbers. Mr. 
Ainsworth's next subjects were " The Tower of London," 
1840; "Old St. Paul's," and "Guy Fawkes," 1841; "the 
Miser's Daughter," 1842; "Windsor Castle," 1843; "St. 
James's," 1844 ; " James II.," 1848 ; " Lancashire Witches," 
1849, and many more, the series being continued till the 
l)resent day, when William Harrison Ainsworth is a novel- 
ist aged 78, still true to his own chosen form of art. His 
novels, though readers have turned now to tales of another 
fashion, have never been without the merit of great skill 
in the shaping of a story from historical material well 
studied and understood. Ainsworth's strength has lain in 
the union of good, honest antiquarian scholarship with art 
in the weaving of romance that is enlivened and not bur- 
dened by his knowledge of the past. 

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer, afterwards Lord 
Lytton, was the son of General Bulwer, and his mother 
was heiress of one of the Lyttons of Knebworth in Hamp- 
shire. He graduated at Cambridge in 1826, began to 
publish when he was fifteen, but obtained his first success 
in 1827 with a novel called " Pelham, or the Adventures 
of a Gentleman." The success was followed up. Other 



298 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tales succeeded rapidly ; " the Disowned " in 1828 ; " Dev- 
ereux" in 1829; "Paul Clifford" in 1830; '^Eugene 
Aram " in 1832. Paul Clifford was a sentimental high- 
wayman, and Eugene Aram a sentimental murderer ; but 
if these novels suggested question, they were followed 
by two of entirely healthy sentiment, "the Last Days 
of Pompeii" in 1834, and "Rienzi" in 1835. In 1837 
followed " Ernest Maltravers," and in 1838 its sequel, 
"Alice, or the Mysteries." Thus at thebeginning of the 
reign the writer then familiarly known as Bulwer was 
firmly established in the first rank of the living novelists. 
The rise of Charles Dickens, in 1836, and the great popu- 
larity soon afterwards acquired by fiction of another 
school, would have drawn away large numbers of Bul- 
wer's readers, had he been less versatile. But in 1838 he 
broke new ground and produced an acted play, " the Lady 
of Lyons," that in spite of artificial sentiment, and a plot 
turning upon an unmanly fraud, touched the old chord of 
revolutionary sentiment and, by help of clever dramatic 
construction, set it vibrating again. "The Lady of Lyons" 
has held the stage throughout the reign. " Richelieu " 
followed in the next year, a play hardly less successful. 
" Richelieu " has also kept the stage. Then followed " the 
Sea Captain," and in 1840 "Money," a comedy ; also novels, 
— "Night and Morning," " Zanoni," "the Last of the 
Barons," — all successes. Then followed satire in verse, 
" the New Timon," with no great success ; a novel " Lu- 
cretia " of which the tendency was open to question ; and, 
in 1849, " the Caxtons " a novel with a complete change 
of method to the use of humour imitated from the style 
of Sterne. About the same time an ambitious attempt 
was made upon Epic poetry, with "King Arthur" for 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 299 

theme and an entirely new set of allegorical adventures in 
place of the old story. There were more books than 
these, and to the last the literary energy was working. 
Bulwer entered Parliament in 1832 and was one of the 
first and chief opponents of wliat were called the Taxes 
upon Knowledge. He obtained a baronetcy in 1838 ; suc- 
ceeded to the Kneb worth estates in 1844, and took the 
name of Lytton ; was raised to the peerage, as Lord Lyt- 
ton, in 1866 ; and died in 1872. Bulwer was married in 
1827 to an Irish lady who separated from him and satir- 
ized him in a novel called " Cheveley." 

His son, Robert, the second Lord Lytton, who was 
Governor General of India under the administration of 
Lord Beaconsfield and was raised in 1880 to an Earldom, 
has distinguished himself in Literature under the name 
of " Owen Meredith." Beginning in 1855 with '' Clytem- 
nestra"and other Poems, followed by "the Wanderer" 
in 1859, a novel in verse, " Lucile," in 1860, and other 
voUimes, of which the " Chronicles and Characters," pub- 
lished in 1868 are the most important, the second Lord 
Lytton has taken a place of honour among living verse- 
writers. Without his father's versatility of power, he has 
much more than his father's gift of song. 

An elder brother of Bulwer's, Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer, 
who was active in the diplomatic service, was raised to 
the peerage in 1871 as Lord Dalling, and died in 1872, 
also obtained distinction as a writer. 

Samuel Warren, born in 1807 in Denbighshire, the son 
of a Pev. Dr. Warren, was educated at the University of 
Edinburgh and turned from the study of Medicine to that 
of Law. He became Queen's Counsel, Recorder of Hull, 
and Master in Lunacy ; wrote legal books ; and died in 



300 OF ENGLISH LITEEATUBE 

1877. At the beginning of the reign Samuel "Warren pub- 
lished, in 1838-40, a series of tales or sketches of life 
called " the Diary of a late Phj^sician " which first appeared 
in " Blackwood's Magazine." In this there were touches 
of pathos ; and there was comic power in his very success- 
ful novel " Ten Tousand a Year," which followed in 1841. 
"Now and Then," in 1848, sustained the author's credit; 
but in 1851 the opening of the Great Exhibition suggested 
a rhapsody of neither prose nor verse called "the Lily and 
the Bee " that showed how a clever novelist with a good 
sense of the ridiculous, and a clear headed lawyer to boot, 
may make himself ridiculous by failing to see the limits 
of his power. 

There were not many poets among the writers who were 
between thirty and forty years old at the time of her 
Majesty's accession. Human powers are called forth by the 
conditions of the life about them. Those conditions are 
to the mind and character of man in the days of his youth 
as soil to seed. Seed that would yield a Milton might 
possibly fall on stony places by the wayside, or on ground 
so poor that the weak growth barely suggests the strength 
and beauty of the shoot that elsewhere, "bore a bright 
golden flower, but not in this soil." It is not worldly 
prosperity that gives the required conditions. Adversity 
often helps better to that stirring of the depths which 
must come to a man in his youth if he shall be in later 
years a man indeed. Happy the man so born that he 
passes from childhood to maturity, through times in which 
all faculties are awakened by keen private or public 
struggle, towards some aim for which he cares, and ought 
to care, with his whole soul. Under such conditions the 
great periods of Literature have always been produced. 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 301 

The golden time of our modern Literature, early in the 
Nineteenth Century, we owe, in all its forms, to stir of 
the French Revolution quickening the minds of men. 
England, in the time of George IV., was a field with its 
last harvest cleared, becoming overrun with weeds, and 
Avaiting for renewal of the discipline of plough and harrow. 
Plough and harrow came. Expansion of thought and en- 
largement of the bounds of energy by development of the 
railway system after 1829 ; the whole stir associated with 
the new French Revolution of 1830 ; the English Reform 
Bill of 1832 ; the energetic efforts towards better educa- 
tion of the People, and better care of the poor ; abolition of 
slavery in the British Colonies in 1834 ; tumults of thought 
raised by the Chartists in 1838 ; the Anti-Corn-Law-League 
in 1839 ; O'Connell's Repeal agitation ; Famine in Ire- 
land ; Father Mathew's apostleship of Temperance ; the 
French Revolution of 1848, deepening throughout Europe 
every feeling that was associated with the social struggles 
of the time, these indicate only a few furrows that broke 
up the hardening soil, and prepared it for a better crop 
of writers in those who were between twenty and thirty 
years old at the beginning of the reign. Tennyson, Glad- 
stone and Charles Darwin, all of like age, were then 
eight and twenty ; Mrs. Browning was of about the same 
age ; Browning and Thackeray were six and twenty ; 
Dickens was five and twenty. 

The best poetry produced by writers of the preceding 
decade of years was dramatic. Henry Taylor, born at 
Durham in 1800, entered the Colonial-Office in 1824, was 
a friend and disciple of Southey's, had already at the be- 
ginning of the reign won high reputation as a poetical 
dramatist, earned by his " Isaac Comnenus," in 1832, and 



302 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

more especially by his larger dramatic poem, " Philip van 
Artevelde," in 1834. This was dedicated to Southey, and 
in its preface advocated union of reason with imagination 
against poetry that, like Byron's, painted, Henry Taylor 
said, selfish passions of men in whom all is vanity, or 
poetry shaped by the more powerful and expansive imagi- 
nation of Shelley, whose disciples he called followers of 
the Phantastic School. " Philip van Artevelde " remains 
its author's master-piece. It has one clear conception em- 
bodied in two plays full of a sedate dignity and beauty, is 
poetic in conception and construction, and not without a 
touch or two of pathos in the equable and noble strain of 
a music that is not strongly emotional. Henry Taylor's 
dramatic works in the reign of Victoria have been " Edwin 
the Fair," in 1842, "the Virgin Widow," in 1850, and in 
1862 " St. Clement's Eve," with its scene laid in mediaeval 
France. Sir Henry Taylor was knighted in 1873 for his 
services at the Colonial-Office. 

A somewhat older writer, Thomas Noon Talfourd, born 
at Reading in 1795, the son of a brewer, became a distin- 
guished lawyer, and wrote three poetical plays that were 
illustrated by the genius of Macready, the chief actor of 
their day. The first was the best, "Ion," first acted in 
May 1836. At the beginning of the reign Macready was 
endeavouring to establish the poetical drama at Covent 
Garden Theatre, and Talfourd's second play, "the Athe- 
nian Captive," again upon a great classical theme, came 
to him in 1838 as a disappointment, for it wanted, he 
thought, stage effect, and did not give chief prominence 
to his own part. The poet had to alter the play much 
before its production, but he afterwards printed it with 
his original close. 



IN THE EEIGN OF VICTORIA. 303 

The living dramatists upon whom Macreacly chiefly 
depended in his Covent Garden management were Bul- 
wer, Talfourd and Sheridan Knowles. Bulwer's " Lady 
of Lyons" and "Richelieu" and Talfourd's "Ion" then 
first declared them dramatists. James Sheridan Knowles, 
an older man, who was born at Cork in 1784 and died in 
1862, had been known to Macready since 1820. Li that 
year the MS. of " Virginius " was sent to him by a friend 
at Glasgow, with account of the success of tlie play at the 
Glasgow theatre. The phiy was then produced at Covent 
Garden, with Charles Kemble and Miss Foote among its 
actors, as well as Macready, who delighted in the part of 
Virginius, and to whom Sheridan Knowles became thence- 
forth a dramatic poet laureate. Although his style as a 
i:>oet was but weakly imitative of our elder drama, Sher- 
idan Knowles had skill in the construction of his plots, 
and that quick sense of stage effect which gratifies an 
actor who must needs think of the figure he will make 
upon the stage. Knowles's " William Tell " had been 
written in 1825. " The Hunchback " was produced in 
1832, and another very successful comedy, jDroduced under 
Victoria, was " the Love Chase," in the first year of the 
reign. Talfourd's third play, " Glencoe," was shown to 
Macready by Charles Dickens as work of a stranger, 
accepted on its merits, and acted at the Haymarket The- 
atre in 1840. The name of the author was withheld also 
from the public until after the play had succeeded. This 
was designed as a suggestion to the unacted dramatists, 
who were then loudly complaining of neglect. 

The most remarkable instance of the influence of the 
Elizabethan drama on the minds of men who were looking 
back to the old vigorous Literature of the days before 



304 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

the Commonwealth, was a wildly poetical play called 
" Death's Jest Book, or the Fool's Tragedy," by Thomas 
Lovell Beddoes, which was published in 1850, after the 
death of its author, and followed by his " Poems " in 
1851. The play might almost have been written by John 
Webster or John Ford, and in this respect it differs 
greatly from the modern Elizabethanism of Sheridan 
Knowles and others. Its author was the eldest son of Dr. 
Thomas Beddoes of Clifton, the early friend of Humphry 
Davy, and his mother was a sister of Maria Edgeworth. 
T. L. Beddoes was born in 1803, educated at the Bath 
Grammar school, the Charterhouse and Pembroke College, 
Oxford, and showed when a student intense interest 
in the poetic drama. Having graduated at Oxford, he 
studied physic for four years at Gottingen. He lived 
chiefly abroad, most in Germany and Switzerland, and 
died in January 1849. 

In the first years of the reign of Victoria the stage had 
in Mr. James Robinson Blanche a delightful writer of 
brilliant extravaganzas, fairy pieces with grace of inven- 
tion and treatment, and with ingenuity and beauty in the 
manner of presentment. Mr. Planch^ is descended from 
one of the French protestant families that came to Eng- 
land after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He 
was born in 1796, and wrote the first of his extravaganzas 
at the age of twenty-two. It was produced at Drury 
Lane Theatre in the year 1818. Mr. Planche distin- 
guished himself also as a student of ancient life and man- 
ners, whose antiquarian knowledge, joined to his good 
taste, made him a valuable counsellor upon all points of 
dramatic costume. He was created Rouge Croix Pur- 
suivant of Arms in 1854, and Somerset Herald in 1866. 



IK THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 305 

He has written nearly two hundred pieces, edited Fairy 
Tales, written upon antiquities, and produced a ^^aluable 
" Dictionary of British Costume," published in 1880. 

Adelaide Kemble, younger daughter of Charles Kemble, 
who achieved in the earlier years of the reign of Victoria 
high reputation as a singer, left the stage in 1843, upon 
her marriage to Mr. Sartoris. In 1847 she contributed to 
the Literature of the reign a pleasant volume called " A 
Week in a French Country House." 

John Anthony Heraud, born in 1799, was in his earlier 
years a busy man of letters and published in 1830 and 
1834 two epic poems, " the Descent into Hell " and '' the 
Judgment of the Flood." He has since written several 
tragedies in blank verse of which one, "Videna," was 
acted in 1854. 

Richard Hengist Home, born in 1807, began life as a 
sailor, saw service in war between Mexico and Spain, 
visited Indian tribes of North America and had many 
adventures before he settled in London as a writer. His 
work has often indicated high poetic power. Poets have 
felt the force and beauty of his "Death of Marlowe" 
published in 1838, and his "Orion" deserves a place in 
Literature upon higher ground than that it is an epic poem 
which was published in 1843 at the price of a farthing, 
to express its author's sense of the public estimation of 
such Literature. 

Charles Swain, who was born in 1803, and died in 1874, 
began life in dyeworks at Manchester, but joined after- 
wards a firm of engravers. He had skill as a lyric poet, 
and many of his songs, written to aid the progress of 
society, Avere current among the people. " There's a good 
time coming, boys," was once a refrain of his common 



306 OF ENGLISH LITERATUBE 

throughout England. It was a good time commg for 
which they were to " wait a little longer ; " and we battle 
for it yet. 

Thomas Cooper, known as " the Chartist," was born in 
1805, at Leicester. He taught himself Hebrew, Greek, 
Latin, and French, while working at a shoemaker's stall ; 
then he became schoolmaster. He was a Chartist leader 
at Leicester in 1841, and in 1842 was sentenced to two 
years' imprisonment on a charge of sedition. In gaol he 
wrote his poem " The Purgatory of Suicides," published 
in 1845, and afterwards he wrote both prose and verse ; 
novels, political articles and poems bearing on the condi- 
tion of the people. He lectured also in many places, 
preached, and battled against the loss of religious faith 
that spread among working men. Thomas Cooper's " Au- 
tobiography," published in 1872, gives, from a point of 
view most interesting to the student of our time, a picture 
of no small part of the onward battle in which true 
Englishmen of every rank and every form of opinion now 
are combatant. 

George Borrow, of Cornish family, was born at East 
Dereham in 1803. He began active life articled to a soli- 
citor at Norwich, and there he became interested in the 
language and manner of the gipsies who camped on a 
neighbouring heath. He gave up Law for Literature, 
and after 1833 travelled, for the British and Foreign Bible 
Society, in Russia and Spain. In 1841 he published an 
account of the gipsies in Spain, "the Zincali;" and in 
1842 " the Bible in Spain." The author's spirit of adven- 
ture, with earnestness of character and genuine enthusiasm 
for studies of gipsy life and language, that had its source 
partly in sense of the picturesque, made these books very 



IN THE BEIGK OF VICTOBIA. 307 

delightful. Mr. Borrow has since travelled among gipsies 
of Eastern Europe, and has published other books ; " La- 
vengro," in 1851; "the Romany Rye," in 1857; also "Ro- 
mano Lavo-Lil, a word-book of the Romany, or English 
Gipsy Language," in 1874. 

The students of our past History and Literature who 
were between thirty and forty at the beginning of the 
reign, were Alexander Dyce, Sir Frederick Madden, the 
Earl of Stanhope, Mr. William John Thorns and Mr. 
Charles Roach Smith. Mr. Dyce, born at Edinburgh, 
in 1798, was the son of a general officer in the East India, 
Company's service. He was educated in the Edinburgh 
High-School and at Exeter College, Oxford. He was 
ordained, held curacies in Cornwall and Suffolk, and in 
1827 settled in London, where his knowledge of Italian 
as well as of English Literature, and his true sense of 
poetry, obtained for him the first place among students of 
the Elizabethan Drama. He qualified himself for his place 
as the best editor of Shakespeare's text by editing the 
works of George Peele in 1829, of John Webster in 1830, 
of Robert Greene in 1831, of Thomas Middleton in 1840, 
of Beaumont and Fletcher in 1843-46. The first edi- 
tion of Dyce's Shakespeare appeared in 1857. In 1864 
the second edition gave the results of continued study in 
fuller revision of the text. Ripe judgment and thorough 
familiarity with all forms of Elizabethan thought enabled 
the editor to be a little bolder in correction of those errors 
in the old printed texts which he had, at first, not ventured 
to touch. Dyce died in February 1864, leaving much 
material ready for the next revision of his work, and the 
publication of a third edition of his Shakespeare in 1874, 
including all his latest notes, was due to the generous care 



308 OF ENGLISH LITERATUBE 

of his friend John Forster. We have in Dyce's edition 
that which is now generally accepted as — thus far — the 
best attainable text of the Shakespeare's Plays. 

Sir Frederick Madden, born in 1801 and knighted in 
1833, became keeper of the MSS. in the British Museum 
in the year of Her Majesty's accession. Of many pieces 
of old English Literature first edited by him from their 
MSS. the most important was that of Layamon's " Brut," 
in 1847 ; he was the first editor also of other works of high 
interest, the Romances of Havelok, the Dane, in 1828 ; 
William and the Werwolf, in 1832 ; and Sir Gawayne, in 
1839. Sir Frederick Madden died in March 1873. Wil- 
liam John Thoms, born in 1803, began active life as a clerk 
in the Secretary's Office at Chelsea Hospital. He pub- 
lished in 1828 a valuable collection of the " Early English 
Prose Romances ; " of Robert the Devil, Friar Bacon, 
Vergil the Enchanter, Doctor Faustus, and others. Of this 
work there was an enlarged second edition in 1858. One 
of the best of many services for which students of English 
Life and Literature are indebted to Mr. Thoms was his 
foundation in 1850 of "Notes and Queries," a medium 
of intercommunication through which literary men can 
have full aid of fellowship in their research. He was him- 
self editor of his journal until 1873, and it still lives and 
thrives, being not only an important aid to research, but, 
by its nature, also an amusing miscellany of curious infor- 
mation for those who seek in it intellectual entertainment. 
Mr. Thoms has distinguished himself by pleasant attacks 
upon faith in the duration of life. to a hundred years or 
more. The only malice of the world towards him lies in 
its hope that he may live to see the happy completion of his 
own hundredth year on the 16tli of November 1903. 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 309 

Charles Roach Smith, who was born in 1804, at Land- 
guard Manor in the Isle of Wight, has distinguished 
himself as an explorer and interpreter of local antiquities. 
He published from 1848 to 1866 six volumes of " Collecta- 
nea Antiqua ; " from 1850 to 1858 books on the Antiqui- 
ties of Richborough, Reculver and Lymne, and in 1859 
"Illustrations of Roman London." He has been lately 
interested in the discovery of a Roman Villa at Brading 
in his native island. Mention should here also be made 
of the antiquarian writings of the Rev. John Collingwood 
Bruce, born at Newcastle in 1805, whose work on " the 
Roman Wall ; a Description of the Mural Barrier of the 
North of England," first published in 1851, reached a third 
edition in 1867. In a large volume, amply illustrated, it 
supplies the most exhaustive treatment of its subject. 

The historians of this decade of years, were Macaulay, 
Lord Mahon afterwards Earl Stanhope, Sir George Corne- 
wall Lewis, Eyre Evans Crowe, and Thomas Henry Dyer ; 
to whom may be added Abraham Hay ward and John Doran 
as writers of lively gossiping essays upon the past. 

Philip Henry Stanhope, Earl Stanhope, first known as 
historian under his earlier title of Lord Mahon, was born 
in 1805 and educated at Christ Church, Oxford. He en- 
tered the House of Commons in 1830, was Under-secre- 
tary of State for Foreign Affairs in 1832, and for a year, 
in 1845-6, he was secretary to the Board of Control. 
He published in 1829 a " Life of Belisarius," in 1832 a 
" History of the War of Succession in Spain ; " in 1836- 
38 his chief work, " History of England from the Peace 
of Utrecht," followed in 1872 by a " History of the Reign 
of Queen Anne," which was designed to form a link be- 
tween Lord Macaulay's History and his own. " Historical 



310 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

Essays" in 1848, and "Miscellanies" in 1863 contained 
Earl Stanhope's contributions to Reviews. He published 
also in 1845 "the Life of the Great Conde," in 1853 "the 
Life of Joan of Arc," in 1861-62 " the Life of William 
Pitt," and took part with Edward Cardwell in the " Mem- 
oirs of Sir Robert Peel," published in 1856. Li 1846 he 
had edited the letters of Lord Chesterfield, and in that 
year he was elected to the Presidency of the Society of 
Antiquaries. Earl Stanhope died in December 1875. 

Sir George Cornewall Lewis, born in 1806, was the son 
of Sir Thomas Frankland Lewis, a baronet of an old Rad- 
norshire family. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, 
and first entered the service of the country as one of a 
Commission appointed in 1831 to consider the state of the 
Irish Church and of the Irish People. From 1839 to 1847 
he was Chief Commissioner of Poor Laws. In 1847 he 
entered Parliament and became Secretary to the Board of 
Control. In 1848 he was Under Secretary of the Home 
Department, and in 1850 Secretary of the Treasury. In 
1854-55 he edited "the Edinburgh Review." After 1855 
Sir George Cornewall Lewis served in the highest offices 
of the State, first as Chancellor of the Exchequer, then as 
Home Secretary, in 1858-9. He was Secretary of State 
for the War Department, when he died in April 1863. 
He was a keen critic of historical traditions, and applied 
a clear calm mind with scientific accuracy to questions of 
the past and present. In 1832 he published "Remarks 
on the Use and Abuse of Political Terms," in 1840 " an 
Essay on the Romance Language," and "a Glossary of 
Herefordshire Provincial Words;" in 1841 "an Essay 
on the Government of Dependencies," in 1849 " On the 
Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion," in 1852 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 311 

two volumes on " Methods of Observation and Reasoning 
in Politics," in 1855 two volumes of "Inquiry into the 
Credibility of the Early Roman History," remorselessly 
demolishing its legends; in 1862 "an Historical Survey 
of the Astronomy of the Ancients." His " Essays on the 
Administrations of Great Britain from 1783 to 1830 " were 
published after Sir G. C. Lewis's death by Sir Edmund 
Head, in 1864; and they were followed in 1870 by his 
" Letters to Various Friends " edited by his brother, the 
Rev. Sir G. F. Lewis. 

Eyre Evans Crowe, born in 1799, was an active politi- 
cal journalist, who at one time edited " the Daily News." 
In 1830 he contributed " a History of France " to Lard- 
ner's Cyclopaedia. During many of the last years of his 
life, which closed in 1868, he lived in the neighbourhood 
of Paris, for access to French records while he was devel- 
oping his " History of France " into a fuller work, founded 
on careful study of authorities. It was published in five 
octavo volumes between 1858 and 1868, and, unambitious 
in style, it is the most liberal, careful and trustworthy 
" History of France " that has been written by an Eng- 
lishman. 

Thomas Henry Dyer, born in 1804, published in 1861 
" a History of Modern Europe ; " in 1865 " a History of 
the City of Rome ; " and in 1873 " Ancient Athens ; " 
besides other useful historical works. Abraham Hayward, 
born in 1803, was trained to the law and became in 1845 
a Queen's Counsel. He has produced a prose translation 
of Goethe's " Faust " that has been widely read, has writ- 
ten upon Law, and founded " the Law Magazine," and has 
published three series of " Biographical and Critical Es- 
says," being distinguished among Quarterly Reviewers for 



312 OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE 

light and lively articles abounding in literary anecdote. 
Mr. Hayward published also in 1861 " the Autobiography, 
Letters and Remains of Mrs. Piozzi," and in 1864 " Diaries 
of a Lady of Quality." John Doran, born in 1807 of an old 
family from Drogheda, received part of his education in 
France and Germany, was Ph.D. of a German University, 
and commonly known as Dr. Doran. He was an active 
man of letters, journalist and author, and was pleasantly 
esteemed for books on various forms of the social life of 
the past. They had usually whimsical titles and were 
crowded with much anecdote. His first books were his 
best, upon Dining and Tailoring, " Table Traits and 
Something on them," and in 1854 "Habits and Men." 
Then followed " Lives of the Queens of the House of 
Hanover " in 1855 ; " Knights and their Days," in 1856 ; 
" Monarchs retired from Business " in 1857 ; " a History 
of Court Fools" (the best part of its contents being 
borrowed without proper acknowledgment from Flogel's 
"Geschichte der Hofnarren ") in 1858; "Lives of the 
Princes of Wales " in 1860 ; " a Memoir of Queen Ade- 
laide" in 1861; "Her Majesties' Servants," talk of the 
past days of the English Stage, in 1864; "Saints and 
Sinners " in 1868 ; " A Lady of the Last Century " (Mrs. 
Elizabeth Montague), with a Chapter on "Blue Stock- 
ings " in 1873. Dr. Doran died in 1878. 

Science was represented among men of this group by 
Sir George Biddell Airy, Richard Owen and the mathe- 
matician, Augustus De Morgan. George Biddell Airy, 
born in Northumberland in 1801, was Senior Wrangler 
at Cambridge in 1823 and obtained a Fellowship at Trin- 
ity in 1824. In 1826 he was appointed Lucasian Professor 
of Mathematics and in 1828 Plumian Professor of Astron- 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 313 

omy, with charge of the Cambridge Observatory. In 
1835 he became Astronomer Royal. That office he held 
throughout the reign of Victoria until his resignation in 
1881, and retirement upon a substantial and well earned 
pension. His researches have been honoured by medals 
from the French Institute, the English Royal Society and 
Astronomical Society. He was among the contributors 
to Charles Knight's Penny Cyclopsedia, and he has writ- 
ten treatises for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, besides 
the records of research contributed to the Cambridge 
Transactions, the Philosophical Transactions and the Me- 
moirs of the Royal Astronomical Society. 

Augustus De Morgan, born in Southern India in 1806, 
was fourth wrangler at Cambridge in 1827. In 1828 he 
became the first Professor of Mathematics in University 
College, then opened as the University of London. He 
was not only the most successful teacher, but the most 
learned authority of his time upon the history of Mathe- 
matics, and in the practice of his science a most acute 
pleader for the union of Mathematics with Logic. He 
wrote books upon every department of Mathematics, and 
was conspicuous for union of shrewd critical wit with 
good sense and a wide erudition. This was shewn in the 
" Budget of Paradoxes," contributed from time to time to 
"the Athengeum." He died in March 1871 and his " Para- 
doxes " were reprinted as a volume in 1872. Of De 
Morgan's ready liveliness in talk let this serve as example. 
Dr. Sharpey, the veteran physiologist, was talking in the 
College Common Room of old days before the Anatomy 
Act, when body snatchers provided subjects for Anatomists 
and Surgeons. He had as a young man to receive the 
supply for his teacher. A rival teacher turned informer. 



314 OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE 

— At once De Morgan broke in with a new version of an 

old song, 

" If a body need a body 
Surgery to teach, 
If a body prig a body, 
Il^eed a body peach ? " 

Richard Owen, born at Lancaster in 1804, was educated 
at the University of Edinburgh, and at schools of medicine 
in Paris. He began life with the practice of medicine, 
but api^ointment to the post of Assistant Curator of the 
Hunterian Museum developed his inclination for the study 
of Comparative Anatomy. After teaching at St. Barthol- 
omew's medical school, he became in 1836 Professor of 
Anatomy and Physiology in the College of Surgeons. 
This office he held for twenty years, and then he was 
made Superintendent of the Natural History Departments 
in the British Museum. Professor Owen's Lectures on 
Comparative Anatomy were first published in 1843 ; his 
"History of British Fossil Mammals and Birds" in 1846. 
In 1849 he published a work on "the Nature of Limbs," 
dwelling upon the unity of design throughout creation, 
and in 1855 a Lecture "On the Classification and Geo- 
graphical Distribution of the Mammalia, with an Appendix 
on the Gorilla, and the Extinction and Transmutation of 
Species." This discussion prepared the way for Charles 
Darwin's reasonings, in 1859, upon " the Origin of Species 
by means of Natural Selection." In 1860 Professor Owen 
published his " Palaeontology, or a systematic summary of 
Extinct Animals, and their Geological Relations." Among 
other works that followed was one, in 1866, on " the Anat- 
omy of the Vertebrates." Another, in 1877, was on '' The 
Fossil Mammals of Australia, and on the extinct Marsu- 
pials of England." 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 815 

There is to be included among writers born within this 
decade of years, Walter White, Assistant Secretary to the 
Royal Society, who has published many pleasant books 
describing holiday walks. In 1855 it was " a Londoner's 
Walk to the Land's End ; " in 1858 " a Month in York- 
shire ; " in 1859 " Northumberland and the Border ; " in 
1860 " All Round the Wrekin," and so forth ; encouraging 
wise Englishmen to know their homes while not avoiding 
knowledge also of their neighbours ; other of Mr. White's 
books being records of holidays in Switzerland, the Tyrol, 
Saxony, Bohemia and Silesia. 

Richard Chenevix Trench, born in 1807, and now Arch- 
bishop of Dublin, held a living in Hampshire when he 
became known by a volume of good verse, " Justin Martyr, 
and other Poems." His religious writings have since been 
marked by refinement of taste, and some short courses of 
lectures upon the use of English, addressed to boys, have 
been given with great advantage to the public. " The 
Study of Words," published in 1852, " English Past and 
Present," in 1855, " Select Glossary of English Words 
used formerly in Senses different from their Present," in 
1859, are suggestive little books that have passed through 
many editions, and are still freely used. Dr. Trench was 
Dr. Buckland's successor as Dean of Westminster from 
1856 to the end of 1863, when he succeeded Dr. Whately 
in the Archbishopric of Dublin. 

John Stuart Mill was thirty-one years old at the begin- 
ning of the reign. He was born in London in 1806, eldest 
son of James Mill, and instructed by his father, who, says 
the son, " in all his teaching demanded of me not only the 
utmost I could do, but much that I could by no possibility 
have done." John Stuart Mill began Greek at the age 



316 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of three. Children's books he seldom saw, but he read 
through the historical part of the first thirty volumes of 
" the Annual Register." The boy had a sensitive mind, 
and fresh shoots of imagination that dried up for want 
of culture. He was told to read the historical plays of 
Shakespeare, for their facts, and he went on to others for 
their poetry ; but he was put upon a severe course of Logic 
at the age of twelve. It began with Aristotle's Organon, 
with which were to be taken the whole or parts of several 
of the Latin treatises on the Scholastic Logic. Upon 
them followed the " Computatio, sive Logica " of Hobbes, 
and he studied much in his father's " History of India," 
which was first published in 1818, when the boy was 
twelve years old. Towards religion James Mill's attitude 
was what he considered logical, and he taught his son to 
look upon the modern as on tlie ancient religion as some- 
thing that in no way concerned him. " This point in my 
early education," wrote J. S. Mill, "had, however, inci- 
dentally one bad consequence deserving notice. In giving 
me an opinion contrary to that of the world, my father 
thought it necessary to give it as one which could not 
prudently be avowed to the world." For passionate emo- 
tions of all sorts, James Mill professed the greatest con- 
tempt. " He resembled," says his son, " most Englishmen 
in being ashamed of the signs of feeling, and by the absence 
of demonstration, starving the feelings themselves." After 
such education, John Stuart Mill followed his father's 
steps in the East India House, and rose, after 33 years 
service, from a clerkship to the post his father had held as 
chief. This was in 1856. He had married in 1851, and 
suffered deeply upon his wife's death in 1858. " Her 
memory," he wrote in his " Autobiography " (published 



IJV THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 317 

after his own death in 1873) " is to me a religion, and her 
approbation the standard by which, summing up as it does 
all worthiness, I endeavour to regulate my life." The 
control of the East India Company over India was trans- 
ferred to the British Government in 1858. John Stuart 
Mill was offered a seat in the new Council, but he pre- 
ferred to retire upon the compensation granted him and 
give the rest of his life to his studies. He died in j\Iay 
1873. The impulses of a fine nature, that his father's 
heavy and one-sided training weakened indeed but could 
not kill, give frequent charm to the disquisitions of John 
Stuart Mill. First came, from the mind thus trained, a 
" System of Logic " in 1843 ; then " Principles of Political 
Economy," early in 1848, a second edition being called 
for within the year. In 1859-67 followed three volumes 
of " Dissertations and Discussions " chiefly from the " Edin- 
burgh " and "Westminster" Reviews. "Considerations 
on Representative Government," 1861 ; " Utilitarianism," 
1863; " Auguste Comte and Positivism," 1865 ; in the same 
year "Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy," 
and in 1869 " the Subjection of Women," a plea for the 
full political and social rights of women, are the most 
important of J. S. Mill's other books. In the " Autobiogra- 
phy," published after his death. Mill indicates through all 
his tenderness, sincerity and truth, and his strong interest 
in questions that touched the well-being of man, a poetic 
temperament that had been starved in the training. There 
is almost pathos in his account of the great comfort he 
found in the poetry of Wordsworth, with the supposition 
that he owed it, not to sympathy with the high thought 
and purpose of the poet, but to the fact that he was not 
himself poetical. " Wordsworth," he said, " may be called. 



318 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and con- 
templative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely 
those which require poetic cultivation." His father, in 
fact, had not succeeded in stamping all poetry out of him. 
Carlyle expected of John Stuart Mill, when he was a 
young man, that he would prove a mystic. 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA, 319 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE BEST VIGOUR OF OUR TIME; AND WHAT REMAINS 

OF IT. 

Next comes the nintli wave, " gathering half the deep, 
and full of voices," that is breaking now upon our shore 
of time, while the new waves that roll up behind it must 
grow yet before we know their force. The best vigour of 
our time is in writers who were between twenty and thirty 
years old at the beginning of the reign. To their group 
belong Tennyson and Browning ; Mrs. Browning ; Dick- 
ens and Thackeray; the Misses Bronte; Mrs. Gaskell; 
Gladstone ; Darwin ; and others who represent activity in 
many forms. 

Charles Dickens was born on the 7th of February 1812, 
at Landport in Portsea, son of John Dickens, a clerk in 
the Navy Pay Office, who was then stationed at Ports- 
mouth Dockyard. He was the second of eight children, 
of whom two died in infancy. In 1814 his father's duties 
were transferred to London, and in 1816 to the dockyard 
at Chatham, where the family lived in St. Mary's Place 
next door to a Baptist Chapel. Coming once from 'Chat- 
ham with his father he passed Gad's Hill Place, admired 
it, and was told that he might live in it if he came to be 
a man and should work hard enough. It was a pleasure 
to him, in after years, to bring this prediction to fulfilment. 
At Chatham, Charles Dickens went to a day-school in 



320 OF ENGLISH LITEEATUBE 

Home Lane. His father had a cheap series of the works 
of novelists and essayists — Fielding, Smollett, " the Vicar 
of Wakefield," "Don Quixote," "Gil Bias," "Robinson 
Crusoe;" the "Spectator," "Tatler," "Idler," "Citizen 
of the World," and Mrs. Inchbald's collection of Farces. 
These furnished pasture ground, and Charles Dickens 
took, as a boy, to writing, produced a tragedy " Misnar, 
Sultan of India " founded upon one of the " Tales of the 
Genii." A cousin, James Lamert, son of a Commander 
in the Navy, with his widowed stepmother, sister to Mrs. 
John Dickens, was part of the household at Portsea and 
Chatham. At Chatham Mrs. Lamert married a staff doc- 
tor in the army. He is sketched in Pickwick. James 
Lamert, who was being educated at Sandhurst, had a taste 
for the stage, got up private theatricals, and took his young 
cousin to the theatre. In 1820-21, during the last two 
years at Chatham, Dickens was at a school in Clover Lane, 
kept by the Rev. W. Giles, of the Baptist Chapel next 
door. In 1821, the family came to London and lived in 
Bayham Street, Camden Town. James Lamert had fin- 
ished his education at Sandhurst, and was waiting for a 
commission. Dickens, having been brought to London, 
found friends in a godfather who was a well-to-do rigger, 
mast, oar and block maker in Limehouse, and in an elder 
brother of his mother's, James Barrow, who was laid up 
with a broken leg at lodgings in Gerrard Street, Soho, 
over a bookseller's shop kept by a widow, from whom 
books were borrowed. 

In 1822 John Dickens, who had retired on a small pen- 
sion, was in difficulties. Mrs. John Dickens set up a 
school in two parlours of an empty house at 4 Gower 
Street, North, with some hope that Charles's godfather. 



IN THE BEIGlSr OF VICTORIA. 321 

credited with an Indian connexion, might bring pupils. 
The education of John Dickens's own children was, mean- 
while, neglected, except that the eldest daughter was sent 
to the Academy of Music. After a few months John 
Dickens was arrested for debt, and lodged in the Marshal- 
sea prison. Everything was sold and pawned, including 
the books. James Lamert — still waiting for the com- 
mission, which he resigned, when it came long afterwards, 
to a younger brother — about this time joined a cousin 
George, who had some money, in setting up an opposition 
to Robert Warren's much advertised Blacking shop at 30, 
Strand. A Jonathan Warren had traded on the name 
which in those days was to be read on most of the walls in 
England, and sold " Warren's Blacking " at " 30 (Hunger- 
ford Stairs) Strand," printing a very minute " Hungerford 
Stairs " between big " 30 " and big " Strand." George 
Lamert bought Jonathan Warren's business, and went into 
it with his brother James. Charles Dickens, then ten 
years old, was employed in the business to cover blacking 
j)ots, and received for his services six shillings a week. 
His home was broken up ; his mother had gone to live 
with his father in the IMarshalsea ; and the boy was put to 
lodge Avith an old lady in Little College Street, recollec- 
tions of whom are in the character of Mrs. Pipchin in 
"Dombey and Son." He had to keep himself out of his 
wages ; moved presently to lodgings near the Marshalsea, in 
Lant Street, Borough, (home of Mr. Bob Sawyer in " Pick- 
wick,") taking breakfast and supper in the prison. There 
the famil}^ was still waited upon by a small maid of all 
work first taken from Chatham workhouse, the original of 
"the Marchioness " in "the Old Curiosity Shop." John 
Dickens took the benefit of the Act that cleared him as a 



322 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

bankrupt. About tlie same time the blacking business of 
the Lamerts had been removed to Chandos Street, Covent 
Garden, at the Corner of Bedford Street, and little Charles 
Dickens had been put into the window that the public 
might get an impression of extensive business from the 
sight of his swift tying of the blacking pots. John Dick- 
ens then quarrelled with the Lamerts, took his son away, 
and sent him, in 1824, to school. He was in 1824-26 at 
two private schools before he was put into business as 
office boy at an attorney's. 

In 1828 John Dickens had become a parliamentary 
reporter. His son Charles then followed his lead, devoted 
himself to a close study of shorthand in the reading room 
of the British Museum, acquired skill, and practised for 
two years as reporter for an office in Doctor's Commons. 
In 1831, aged nineteen, he was reporter for " the True 
Sun," and it was here that he first formed his friendship 
with a young journalist of his own age, John Forster, who 
remained his life-long friend. In 1832, Dickens's uncle 
Barrow started a "Mirror of Parliament" that was to 
excel Hansard in reporting the debates. Charles Dickens 
reported for it, during two years, and then the speculation 
failed. In January 1834 Dickens became reporter for 
"the Morning Chronicle " under John Black, a genial and 
energetic editor. He contributed street sketches also to 
a magazine " the Old Monthly," which could not pay for 
them. In August 1834, in "the Old Monthly," he first 
signed himself " Boz." That was the domestic pet name 
of his 3^oungest brother Augustus, who had been named 
after Moses in " the Vicar of Wakefield," then had his 
Moses turned into Boses, and his Boses into Boz. In 
1835 " the Evening Chronicle " was started as an offshoot 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 323 

from "the Morning Chronicle," and Mr. George Hogarth, 
musical critic of " the Morning Chronicle," was active in 
its preparation. Dickens was asked to supply an original 
sketch for the first number, like his street sketches in " the 
Old Monthly." He supplied it, and proposed a series, 
with hope of pay for it that might be added to his salary 
as a reporter. This was arranged, and his salary was 
raised from five to seven guineas a week. The sketches in 
" the Evening Chronicle " were signed " Boz," and were 
much liked. In 1836, Dickens's age being 22, the First 
Series of " Sketches by Boz " was published as a volume, 
and the copyright sold to a young publisher for £150. 
At the same time there was a proposal by George Seymour, 
a comic artist, who amused himself and others a good 
deal at the expense of cockney sportsmen, to produce a 
series of comic plates. The publishers of the proposed 
series, Messrs. Chapman and Hall, looked for an amusing 
writer of pen sketches that might be attached to them, 
and they applied to the lively author of "Sketches by 
Boz." Dickens suggested that the new Sketches written 
by him for Seymour's pictures should have some continu- 
ity, however slight, and it was agreed that this could be 
obtained by forming comic characters into a club. Thus 
came into existence the "Posthumous Papers of the Pick- 
wick Club," of which No. 1 appeared on the 31st of 
Marcli 1836. On the second of the following April, 
Dickens married the eldest daughter of his friend George 
Hogarth, drawing from " Pickwick " one month's pay in 
advance for wedding expenses. The payment was to be 
£15 for each number. Between the appearances of No. 1 
and No. 2, Seymour committed suicide ; pictures were in- 
dispensable, and Thackeray, then an art student, offered 



324 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

to supply tliem. The artist chosen was Hablot Browne, 
who signed himself " Phiz." By the time the sixth num- 
ber was reached, there was much talking about " Pick- 
wick," in which a new writer, a man of genius, with high 
spirits that cheered all readers, was revelling in wit and 
whim. There was little or no plan in the book ; that had 
not been part of the original design; but, story or no 
story, in 1837, at the beginning of Her Majesty's reign, 
there was " Pickwick." It is said that when the delight 
in " Pickwick " was at its height, a ponderous divine, who 
had been giving counsel at the bedside of a dying man 
beard as he left the room his victim sigh, " Thank Heaven, 
there will be another 'Pickwick' in three days!" In 
August 1836 Dickens had agreed with Richard Bentley, 
the publisher, to edit a magazine for him, " Bentley's Mis- 
cellany," and write a tale in it. The tale was " Oliver 
Twist," begun in February 1837, and aided greatly by 
George Cruikshank as an illustrator. Dickens's fame had 
risen so rapidly that the young publisher who gave .£150 
for the " Sketches by Boz " asked X 2,000 for the surrender 
of his bargain. Payments agreed upon for extra sale 
brought up the price of "Pickwick" to <£ 2,500; and for 
the next novel, published, like "Pickwick," in twenty 
green-covered monthly numbers, the price was .£150 a 
number, with reversion of copyright to the author in five 
years. 

In 1840 and 1841 Dickens attempted weekly publica- 
tion of his " Master Humphrey's Clock " which contained, 
besides short stories, "the Old Curiosity Shop," one of 
the best of his novels, and " Barnaby Pudge." A visit to 
America yielded in 1842 " American Notes." In 1843 he 
produced a five shilling Christmas story, daintily printed 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA, 325 

and illustrated with woodcuts and coloured plates, " The 
Christmas Carol." This was a new form of pleasure; 
and as the successful novels in monthly numbers set 
many producing novels in monthly numbers, so the suc- 
cessful Christmas book, set many producing Christmas 
books of the same outward pattern. Dickens continued 
the practice only through the next four years, publishing 
in 1844 "the Cricket on the Hearth;" in 1845 "the 
Chimes;" in 1846 "the Battle of Life;" and in 1847 
" the Haunted Man." His longer tales, always first told 
in twenty monthly numbers, were " Martin Chuzzlewit," 
in 1844, " Dombey and Son," in 1848, and " David Cop- 
perfield," in 1850. 

In 1845 Dickens's energy led to the establishment of an 
important newspaper "The Daily News." The prospec- 
tus of it was written by him ; its first number, which 
appeared on the 21st of January, 1846, was edited by 
him ; and he remained editor until the 9th of the next 
month. In aid of this venture he had begun to write im- 
pressions of Italian travel, and he continued to contribute, 
after the editor's work had been transferred, for the rest 
of the year, to his friend Forster. The volume of " Pic- 
tures from Italy " appeared in 1846. 

In 1850 Dickens established " Household Words " as a 
weekly journal that was to join reason with imagination 
in support of every effort towards the improvement of 
society. There were to be tales, sketches, poems, always 
designed in aid of right citizen-building. He would help 
one half of the world really to know how the other half 
lived. This was putting to high use the wide spread 
influence he had acquired. He gathered about him, as 
fellow workers, all whom he thought able and found ready 



326 OF ENGLISH LITEEATUBE 

to aid liis design. " Household Words " prospered until 
1859, when its sale was doubled by continuing it as a new 
series under a new name, " All the Year Round." Since 
Charles Dickens's death this journal has been successfully 
continued by his son, whose name also is Charles Dickens. 
In Christmas numbers of his weekly journal containing 
tales connected by some little framework of his own de- 
vising, some of the best of Dickens's own short stories 
were written ; but he ceased to produce Christmas num- 
bers when imitation on all hands took away their fresh- 
ness of design. 

In 1852 was published "the Child's History of Eng- 
land," written originally for " Household Words." The 
conception of the book was an honest one — to sweep 
away historical conventions and reach unsoj^histicated 
truth — but the execution of it required much knowledge 
in which Dickens was deficient. " Bleak House " was the 
next novel, in twenty numbers. It was completed in 
1853. In 1854 "Hard Times" Avas republished from 
" Household Words." Then " Little Dorrit " appeared in 
the usual twenty numbers, completed in 1855. In 1859 
Dickens's powerful story of the days of the French Revo- 
lution, "the Tale of Two Cities," was published in "All 
the Year Round." In the same journal appeared also the 
papers collected as "the Uncommercial Traveller," and 
the novel of " Great Expectations," finished in 1861. 
" Our Mutual Friend " returned to the old twenty number 
form, and was finished in November 1865; Dickens had 
added to his labours the public dramatic reading of 
selected portions of his works. Whatever he did was 
done with his whole energy. In 1867 he revisited Amer- 
ica, and after his return planned " Edwin Drood " which 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 327 

was to be completed in twelve instead of twenty monthly 
numbers. Only six had appeared, and the rest was un- 
written, when a sudden seizure, with effusion on the brain, 
brought the great novelist's life to a close on the 9th of 
June 1870, at the age of fifty-eight. Thackeray had 
already passed away. 

William Makepeace Thackeray was born at Calcutta on 
the 18th of July 1811, of a family of Indian Civil Ser- 
vants. His father died in 1816, and his mother was mar- 
ried a few years afterwards to Major Henry Carmichael 
Smith. Thackeray was sent as a child from India for 
education in England, and placed at the Charterhouse. 
He was not particularly happy there, but his gentle 
nature looked back afterwards on his old school with 
growing aifection. In February 1829 he went to Trinity 
College Cambridge, and left in 1830. An inclination 
towards studies of Art took him abroad. In 1831 he was 
at Weimar. In 1832 he was at Paris, when he came of 
age and came into possession of £500 a year. He still 
studied among the painters, half aimlessly, with a genius 
that must needs in due time make Literature his calling, 
but with his future business in life ill defined. In a few 
years he had got rid of his money, by cardplaying and 
newspaper speculation. The loss was gain to him. At 
the beginning of the Reign of Victoria, in 1837, his chief 
income was from " Eraser's Magazine," to which he con- 
tributed, in 1837-38, "the History of Samuel Titmarsh 
and the Great Hoggarty Diamond," and he was writing 
also in the "New Monthly." In 1837 Thackeray mar- 
ried. 

His eldest daughter, now Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, has 
inherited some part of his genius, and is one of the most 



828 OF ENGLISH LITEEATUBE 

delightful of our living novelists, gifted with delicate 
invention, charm of thought and grace of style. 

Thackeray was in those days much in Paris. In 1840 
he published his "Paris Sketch Book," and in 1843 his 
"Irish Sketch Book," having in the interval become 
an active contributor to "Punch," then just founded. 
Thackeray's playful humour had free range in the pages 
of "Punch." There was a dainty spirit of fun in his 
satire and his comic ballads, with a humour all his own. 
In 1844 he published another little book, " a Journey from 
Cornhill to Grand Cairo." In 1846, emulous perhaps of 
the success of Dickens, and strong in the growing sense 
of power, Thackeray followed Dickens's plan of publishing 
a long novel in monthly numbers and began "Vanity 
Fair." It was finished in 1848, in 24 numbers, and then 
for the first time he made known the full breadth of his 
genius. Dickens had leapt to fame at the age of 24 and 
strengthened year by year his hold upon the public. 
Thackeray slowly developed to the full expression of his 
power and was 37 when he took his place with the great 
English novelists by right of " Vanity Fair." In 1849 he 
had an illness which left him subject to those occasional 
attacks of spasm in one of which he at last died. In 1850 
" Pendennis " followed " Vanity Fair," still published in 
monthly numbers. In 1851 Thackeray delivered lectures 
at Willis's Rooms on " the English Humourists ; " and in 
the winter of 1852-53 he lectured in America. The profit 
from lecturing enabled Thackeray to make all requisite 
provision for his family. In coming thus into direct 
relation with his readers, Thackeray preceded Dickens, 
who first thought of public readings in 1846, but, although 
he gave some gratuitous readings in and after December 



IN THE REIGJSr OF VICTORIA, 329 

1853, did not begin the paid readings until 1858. In 
1853 Thackeray produced " the Newcomes," and prepared 
a second series of Lectures on "the Four Georges." 
These proved not less profitable than the lectures on the 
"English Humourists." In 1854 Thackeray published 
" Esmond," one of his best novels, illustrating life in the 
days of Queen Anne, which was artistically coloured 
by making persons of the drama tell their story in an 
English imitating English of the days of Addison and 
Steele. Steele appeared in the story, a man little under- 
stood by Thackeray, the merit of whose accounts of the 
English Humourists does not lie in full knowledge of 
the men he tells about. In 1857-59 appeared the "Vir- 
ginians," a sequel to "Esmond." He was forty-eight 
years old when he completed the " Virginians," and in the 
same year " the Cornhill Magazine " was founded by 
Messrs. Smith and Elder, with Thackeray for Editor. It 
was immediately preceded by "Macmillan's Magazine," 
first published a month earlier than "the Cornhill." 
These two magazines were designed to give for a shilling, 
which replaced the old conventional half crown, a monthly 
supply of the best Literature attainable. " The Cornhill " 
added pictures to letter press, and secured illustrations 
from some of the best English artists, including John 
Everett Millais, Frederick Walker, and the present Presi- 
dent of the Royal Academy, Sir John Leighton. Thack- 
eray was editor of the Magazine until April 1862, and 
continued to write for it until his sudden death, on the 
24th of December 1863. He had published in the Corn- 
hill "the Roundabout Papers," "Lovel the Widower," and 
" the Adventures of Philip," and left behind him a frag- 
ment of a novel, " Denis Duval," which appeared in " the 
Cornhill Magazine " at the beginning of 1864. 



330 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

In their lifetime many vain comparisons were drawn 
between Dickens and Thackeray. They were the great 
novelists of their day, and novel readers took sides in 
dispute about them, after the usual way, by exalting one 
and running down the other. Dickens, with little aid of 
school education in his early years, and in much contact 
with the lower forms of life, had the energy of genius 
strengthened, and its sympathy deepened, by a youth of 
battle against adverse circumstance. The strong will con- 
quered, and the strong will showed its force until the end, 
A vigour impatient of all check set itself face to face 
with tlie ills of life, and spent the gifts of a rare genius 
in strenuous service to humanity. The work of such a 
writer must inevitably show, at times, some traces of the 
want of early culture. To the fastidious, Charles Dick- 
ens would at times, often perhaps, seem vulgar, and his 
generous emotions would also, at times, outrun his judg- 
ment. But brilliant playfulness of fancy in a man of 
genius, whose very defects of conventional training be- 
longed to a childhood and youth brought into close con- 
tact and victorious struggle with the meaner life that was 
about him, and who drew from such education only a 
more vivid sense of social needs, and keener sympathies 
with those who are forced to fight the battle with less 
strength to overcome, cannot be vulgar. Extravagance 
in the play of whimsical suggestion, closer sympathy with 
the lives of the ten million than with the lives of the ten 
thousand, cannot be vulgar when the extravagance is 
unrestrained play of an honest wit, in its fellowship with 
mirth and sorrow intensely human, and capable of flash- 
ing truth upon the world in forms that catch its fancy 
and can touch its heart. The wildest extravagance had 



IN THE BEIGN OF VWTOBIA. 331 

some touch of that individual character by which humour 
rises above wit, and of which Dickens was brimful, the 
complaint being, indeed, that it ran over the brim. When 
Thackeray, who had been moved to tears by No. 5 of 
" Dombey and Son," containing the death of Little Paul, 
threw the number on the table at the "Punch" office, 
and said, " Look there ; who can stand against that ? " he 
knew the strength of Charles Dickens's genius as truly as 
Dickens knew and recognized the strength of his. There 
can be no essential vulgarity in a writer who deliberately 
gives his labour to the highest aims in life ; who seeks, as 
Shakespeare did, by his fictions to draw men to love God 
and their neighbour and to do their work, and who, as 
strenuously as he had done his own work, sought to put 
heart into every irresolute toiler and encourage him to 
battle on. It is said that Dickens erred in writing "nov- 
els with a purpose." What does that mean ? Purposeless 
work is not for the sane. What is meant must be that he 
wrote novels with a wrong purpose, that he built their 
plots upon accidental questions of the day and not upon 
essential truths that are the same to-day and for ever. In 
"Bleak House," for example, he attacked the delays of 
law, and levelled a fiction against the Court of Chancery. 
If that were all, the complaint would be a just one ; but 
that is not all. Dramatist or novelist must needs con- 
struct his tale from some form of the life he finds about 
him, although he should base his tale upon some simple 
and essential truth of life. And in " Bleak House " what 
does the Chancery suit stand for? It is the something 
outside a man's life that may at any day bring fortune to 
him, without labour of his own. Such hope is a blight 
upon the life that trusts to it. Richard Carstone's life is 



332 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

robbed of its true vigour by such dependence on the 
chances of an outward Fortune ; while Esther Summerson 
does her daily duty with cheerful activity, and Mr. Jarn- 
dyce, at Bleak House, much as the suit concerns him, 
puts its possibilities away from him. He takes no thought 
about the Hercules who might come down to set his 
waggon going, but puts, when needful, his own shoulder 
to the wheel, and lives his own life worthily. " Fortune 
reigns in the gifts of the world, not in the lineaments of 
nature." 

Thackeray, on the other hand, was accused of cynicism. 
He had the early culture of which Dickens was deprived, 
and special training as an artist. This gave a grace of 
refinement to his style, which is one part of its charm. 
But another part of his charm, and a main part, is that 
with a fine humour in which, as in all true humour, the 
whole nature of the writer is involved, Thackeray retained 
as a man the playfulness, the simplicity, the tender feeling 
of a child. In playful books, such as " the Rose and the 
Ring," published in 1855, and in his " Ballads," there is, 
with a man's fulness of power, a genuine playfulness, a 
childlike spirit of fun without one trick of affectation to 
cast doubt on its sincerity. But this is absolutely incom- 
patible with what the world calls cynicism. Although 
his view of life was dimmed a little by experiences of a 
public school and of the ways of the young artist world in 
Paris, and he may therefore shake his head sometimes 
over a mother's faith in the goodness of her son, although 
reaction from the weak excesses of French Revolutionary 
sentiment had brought an air of cynicism into fashion, 
Thackeray's ideal of life is really childlike in its purity. 
In " Vanity Fair " he took, like Fielding whom he did not 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 333 

study in vain, a broad canvas on which to paint an image 
of the world. As Fielding, in Tom Jones and Blifil, rep- 
resented the two opposite poles about which our world 
turns, so Thackeray contrasted Becky Sharp and the 
Crawley side of the world with the side of Major Dobbin 
and Amelia. When it was said that his good people were 
innocent babies, that was his praise ; for a childlike inno- 
cence, remote enough from the conception of the cynic, 
was Thackeray's ideal to the last. If Major Dobbin 
seemed too weak, Thackeray mended the fault in Colonel 
Newcome, to whom he gave the same feature of unworldly 
simplicity and innocence. Thackeray's sensibility made 
him, perhaps, a little too much afraid of the conscious 
idlers who consider themselves men of the world. Being 
himself tenderly framed, he took refuge like the hermit 
crab in a shell that was not his own but served well for 
protection. He certainly was, in his younger days, some- 
what too much in awe of the conventions of society ; for 
there is an implied bowing down before them in some of 
the Snob papers that is saved only by its honest origin 
from being not conventionally but essentially vulgar. 
Dickens's Letters have been collected, since his death. 
They are in three volumes, two published in 1880 and one 
in 1881. These show that the man spoke with his own 
voice in his works. If like aid to a true knowledge of 
William Makepeace Thackeray should ever be given in 
the days of our children, it will make nothing more clear 
than the gentleness of the fine spirit from which his novels 
came. 

The Life of Dickens by his friend John Forster was 
published in three volumes in 1872, 3, 4, and a sketch of 
the life of Thackeray has been contributed by Anthony 



334 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

Trollope to a series of short separate biographies of " Men 
of Letters," edited b}^ John Morley. 

John Forster was born at Newcastle in 1812, and was 
educated there at the old grammar school, now pulled 
down to make room for a new railway station. He 
showed his bent towards Literature as a child, and as a 
schoolboy wrote a play that was produced on the New- 
castle stage. He was sent to Cambridge at the time when 
the new London University was being founded, and trans- 
ferred from Cambridge to University College, London, 
where he studied law, under Andrew Amos, with James 
Emerson Tennent and James Whiteside, afterwards Chief 
Justice of Ireland, for his most intimate friends and fellow 
students. At eighteen, he was writing for magazines and 
studying in the chambers of an eminent special pleader, 
Thomas Chitty. In the year of the Reform Bill Forster 
was also writing politics in '' the True Sun " when Dickens 
became a reporter for that paper, and their life-long friend- 
ship then began. 

" The Examiner " newspaper, when it left the hands of 
Leigh Hunt and his brother, had been bought by a Kev. 
Dr. Fellowes, who wished to advocate many reforms and 
religious toleration as an aid to the religious life. In 1830 
Dr. Fellowes entrusted the management of " the Examin- 
er " to Albany Fonblanque. Albany William Fonblanque, 
born in 1793, was the son of an eminent lawj^er, and had 
turned first from training for the army to study of law. 
But at twenty he was drawn into Literature by his in- 
terest in questions of the day, and he soon became a 
brilliant newspaper writer. Between 1820 and 1830, he 
had written for " the Times," " the Morning Chronicle," 
" the Examiner " and other papers, and in 1830, when he 



IJSr THE REIGir OF VICTOBIA. 335 

was entrusted with the editing of " the Examiner " the 
old strength of the journal was renewed. 

John Forster was among writers in "the Examiner,'* 
and within three years after Albany Fonblanque had 
become its editor, Forster was as his right hand in its 
management. To Dionysius Lardner's "Cabinet Cyclo- 
psedia of Original Works on History, Biography, Natural 
Philosophy, Natural History, Arts and Manufactures," 
published between 1829 and 1846, Forster contributed 
at the age of 24 the first of five volumes of the " Lives of 
the Statesmen of the Commonwealth." The last volume 
appeared in 1839 and in 1840 there was a new edition of 
the whole work. In 1842-43 he edited the "Foreign 
Quarterly Review," he was writing also in "the Edin- 
burgh Review," and throughout full of activity for "the 
Examiner," of which he became editor in 1847. Fon- 
blanque, who had become, and remained, chief proprietor, 
withdrew then from the work of editing, upon his ap- 
pointment as chief of the Statistical Department of the 
Board of Trade. Fonblanque parted with the paper only 
a little while before his death in 1872, and wrote in it 
every week while it was his. In 1848 John Forster pub- 
lished his "Life of Goldsmith," which at once took its 
place as one of the best biographies in English Literature. 
In September 1854 his Essay on Foote, and in March 
1855 his Essay on Steele, appeared in the " Quarterly 
Review." The Essay on Steele was the first serious at- 
tempt to rescue from misinterpretation one of the man- 
liest of English writers. Fonblanque wrote of it, " I read 
your ' Steele ' with admiration, not so much for the schol- 
arly writing and fine criticism, but chiefly for the wise 
and, because wise, tender humanity." Forster had chosen 



336 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

from among the writers of Queen Anne's time Jonathan 
Swift for special study, and was during many years col- 
lecting materials for a Life of Swift. In 1855 he with- 
drew from " the Examiner " on being appointed Secretary 
to the Lunacy Commission, and at that time he married. 
Li 1858 his articles in the " Quarterly" and "Edinburgh" 
Reviews were published, in two volumes, as " Historical 
and Biographical Essays," one of them including an Essay 
"on the Debates on the Grand Remonstrance." In 1860 
he published a volume containing special study of the 
attempted " Arrest of the Five Members " by Charles I. 
Then he resolved to give his latter years, with failing 
health, to a full reconstruction of his "Lives of the 
Statesmen of the Commonwealth" written in early life. 
"The Life of Sir John Eliot" appeared accordingly in 
1864. The death of his friend Walter Savage Landor 
turned him aside to the writing of a " Life of Landor " 
published in 1869. The death of his nearest friend, out- 
side his home, Charles Dickens, turned him aside to the 
fulfilment of an old promise that if he survived he would 
be Dickens's biographer. The volumes of this biography, 
in which Forster lived his old life again Avith his dead 
friend, appeared in 1872-4. The death of his friend 
Alexander Dyce in 1869 imposed upon Forster another 
office of love. As his own days of faithful labour drew 
to a close, he was producing a third edition of Dyce's 
Shakespeare ; also an edition of Landor's works ; the last 
volumes of both being edited after Forster's death by 
another old friend, the Rev. Whitwell Elwin. At the 
beginning of 1876 the first volume of Forster's " Life of 
Swift" appeared, containing much new and suggestive 
matter. It remains a fragment. Forster died within a 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 337 

montli after the book appeared. Ill health had with- 
drawn him in his last years from society, in which he had 
once taken a keen delight; and he had always a loud 
important manner that puzzled strangers and amused his 
friends. But he was full of kindliness. No successful 
man of letters ever used his influence more steadily for 
the prompt recognition of the worth of others. Many 
who now are firm in reputation heard the first voice of 
emphatic welcome to the ranks of Literature from John 
Forster in the " Examiner," and liked the voice for being- 
loud. He had enthusiasm. Some say that enthusiasm has 
gone out of fashion. But the mind can no more live in 
health Avithout it, than the body without fire. 

Enthusiasm gave warmth to the work of the three 
daughters of the Rev. Patrick Bronte, who married Maria 
Branwell and, in 1820, went to live in the Vicarage at 
Haworth in Yorkshire with his wife and six children. 
The children were, Maria, born in 1814 ; Elizabeth, born 
in 1815; Charlotte, born in 1816; Patrick Branwell, born 
in 1817; Emily, born in 1818; Anne, born in 1820. The 
mother died in 1821, and her place was taken by her 
sister. Miss Branwell, who, being afraid of cold, kept 
much to her own room. In July 1824, Maria and Eliza- 
beth were sent to a School for Daughters of Clergymen, 
at Cowan Bridge. Charlotte and Emily followed in Sep- 
tember. In the spring of 1825 low fever broke out in 
the school, Maria (the Helen Burns of " Jane Eyre ") 
was taken home, and died in a few days. Elizabeth, also 
consumptive, was sent home, and died early in the sum- 
mer. Charlotte and Emily returned to the school after 
Midsummer, but were removed before the winter. Char- 
lotte was sent, in January 1831, to a school at Roe Head, 



338 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

between Leeds and Huddersfield. She left school in 
1832, sixteen years old, and taught her sisters. In 1835 
she went for three months to Roe Head as a teacher. 
Emily, sent to school there, became homesick, and Anne 
was sent in her place. Then Emily went as teacher to 
a school in Halifax, while Anne and Charlotte were in 
situations. 

In 1841 there was a project of school-keeping in partner- 
ship with the Mistress at Roe Head. In 1842 Charlotte 
and Emily, to qualify themselves in French, went as pupils 
to the pensionnat of Madame and Monsieur Heger at 
Brussels. In 1843 Charlotte Bronte returned to Brussels, 
as English Teacher, with a salary of X 16 a year. Estrange- 
ment arose with Madame over religious differences. At 
home the three girls and their brother Branwell had lived 
their own lives together from early childhood, little ob- 
served by their aunt, or by their father who lived chiefly in 
his study. They wove fictions and dreamed dreams, with 
sensitive child natures and a kindred gift of genius in all. 
But now Branwell had fallen out of the little company 
that once looked on him as cleverest and best. He had 
become dissipated. He took opium. And there was grief 
in the girls' hearts. 

In 1846 the three girls ventured to print, at their own 
cost, a slender volume of " Poems by Currer, Ellis, and 
Acton Bell," taking a name for each that agreed with her 
proper initials. They could venture also to spend two 
pounds in advertising it. The little book, now full of 
literary interest, had no attention from the public. Each 
of the sisters was also at this time writing a novel. Char- 
lotte's tale was "the Professor," Emily's ''Wuthering 
Heights ; " Anne's, " Agnes Grey." They have all been 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 339 

since published, and there is an interesting likeness in 
their differences ; thoughts and experiences common to 
the three sisters are to be found in all. They had ill 
fortune among the publishers ; but Charlotte Bronte fear- 
lessly began another novel. This was "Jane E3a^e," 
begun in August 1846, at a time Avhen she was lodging in 
Manchester with her father who had gone thither to be 
operated upon for cataract, and when she was nursing her 
father in the dark room to which he was then confined. 
Next year Messrs. Smith and Elder declined " the Profes- 
sor," a novel designed for one volume, in kind terms that 
promised attention to a longer work from the same hand. 
In August 1847 Charlotte Bronte sent them " Jane Eyre." 
It fascinated two publishers' readers, and then Mr. Smith 
himself. It was heartily believed in by the firm, and 
promptly published. The reviewers gave onlj^ doubtful 
signs of appreciation. Alone, at first, John Forster, who 
knew genuine work when he met with it, spoke out in his 
hearty and decided way. As Mrs. Gaskell wrote, in her 
" Life of Charlotte Bronte," " ' The Examiner ' came for- 
ward to the rescue, as far as the opinions of professional 
critics were concerned. The literary articles in that paper 
were always remarkable for their genial and generous 
appreciation of merit ; nor was the notice of ' Jane Eyre ' 
an exception ; it was full of hearty, yet delicate and dis- 
criminating praise." 

In the next year, 1848, her brother Branwell died, and 
then her sister Emily. In the folloAving year, 1849, Char- 
lotte Bronte was left alone, by the death of her other 
sister Anne. These griefs all came upon her while she 
was writing her second novel, " Shirley," which had been 
begun soon after the publication of '' Jane Eyre, " and 



840 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

was published in 1849. In this year also, the author's 
name, which Charlotte Bronte had succeeded thus far in 
concealing, became known. "Villette," the pleasantest 
of her books, including recollections of the old school life 
in Brussels, appeared in 1853. In June 1854 Charlotte 
Bronte married Mr. Nicholls, who had been for more than 
eight years her father's curate. On the 31st of March 
1855 she died. When staying with her kindly publishers 
she observed one day the absence of " the Times " from 
the breakfast table, and suspected that it had been put 
aside because it contained an unfavourable review of 
" Shirley " then just published. She persisted in desire to 
see it, found that it condemned her for indelicacy, and, 
though she hid her face behind the ample pages, her tears 
were to be heard falling on the paper. The review was 
honestly meant and the reviewer was not alone in taking 
a man of the world's view of imaginings that trespassed 
through the very innocence of the lone woman who wrote 
while brother and both sisters were dying by her side. 
Mrs. Gaskell's life of her friend, published soon after 
Charlotte Bronte's death, made all this clear. 

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, wife of the Rev. William 
Gaskell of Manchester, was born in 1810. She was the 
daughter of the Eev. William Stevenson, and spent much 
of her girlhood with an aunt at Knutsford, in Cheshire, of 
which place memories abound in her " Cranford." She 
married in 1832, and her first book was, in 1848, a novel, 
" Mary Barton," suggested by questions concerning factory 
labour, which told a tale of factory life with blended 
pathos and humour, and with a keen feminine perception 
of character that won for it immediate and great success. 
Charles Dickens, in 1850, when he was establishing his 



IJSr THE BEIGJSr OF VICTORIA. 341 

" Household Words," looked immediately to Mrs. Gaskell 
as a fellow worker who would touch Avith fine imagina- 
tion and with depth of feeling the realities of life. More 
novels followed. In 1850 the Christmas tale of "the 
Moorland Cottage ; " in 1852 " Lizzie Leigh, and other 
Tales," that had been written for " Household Words." 
Li 1853 followed " Ruth," a novel, and " Cranford " re- 
published from " Household Words." " Cranford " is a 
short tale, or series of connected Sketches, representing 
Avith a delicate and playful humour society at its narrowest 
among maiden ladies and tlieir friends who practise elegant 
economies and seem only to vegetate in a small country 
town. But with the tenderness of a true wisdom, the 
whole impression given is but another reading of the lesson 
that " the situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was 
never yet occupied by man." " Here in the poor, misera- 
ble, hampered actual " of Cranford, Miss Matty, with her 
limited view of life and its economies, shaped her ideal. 
Mrs. Gaskell under all her playful humour makes us feel 
that souls may be heroic and poetic with the narrowest 
surroundings. " North and South " followed in 1855, " the 
Life of Charlotte Bronte " in 1857 ; and among other 
books, "Sylvia's Lovers " in 1863. "Wives and Daugh- 
ters," her last novel, was appearing in " the Cornhill Maga- 
zine," and not quite completed, when Mrs. Gaskell died 
suddenly, while reading to her daughter, in November 
1865. 

Let us now pass rapidly along a line of writers, most of 
them yet living, who were twenty or thirty years old at 
the beginning of the reign. Charles Reade, a living novel- 
ist and dramatist of high mark, was 23; Anthony Trol- 
lope, another of our old favourites, still living, was 22; 



342 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Marmion Savage, a lively novelist of Irish family who 
died in 1872, began his career with a clever sketch of 
Irish society, " The Falcon Family, or Young Ireland " in 
1845. In 1847 followed "the Bachelor of the Albany," 
and in 1849 " My Uncle the Curate." " Reuben Medlicott, 
or the Coming Man " appeared in 1852, for the first time 
with the author's name upon the title page. A short tale 
by Marmion Savage called " Clover Cottage " was drama- 
tised by Tom Taylor as " Nine Points of the Law." 

Elizabeth Missing Sewell, born in the Isle of Wight in 
1815, published "Amy Herbert" in 1844, and this has 
been followed by a long series of religious novels, and 
books helpful to the spread of religious education by the 
Church of England. 

Of the Churchmen, Dr. Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, 
still living, was 26 ; Dr. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, still 
living, was 24. It was in 1863-4 that Dr. Colenso pro- 
duced the " Critical Commentary on the Pentateuch " 
that raised a storm in the Church by pointing out discrep- 
ancies inconsistent with faith in the verbal insj^iration, or 
the single authorship, of the Books ascribed to Moses. 
Henry Alford, Dean of Canterbury, who died in 1871, 
and edited the Greek Testament in sections published 
between 1841 and 1861, was 25 years old ; Frederick Wil- 
liam Robertson, whose Brighton sermons represent the 
pure spirit of Religion freed from all sectarian hatreds, 
was 21 years old at the beginning of the reign and died 
in 1853. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, who sustained long 
battle for the advance of civilization in the same good 
cause, was 20, and died as Dean of Westminster, honoured 
and beloved by all his countrymen in 1881. 

In History there was John Hill Burton, 28 at the begin- 



Iir THE BEIGIf^ OF VICTOBIA. 343 

ning of the reign. He died in 1880, leaving among other 
books a "Life of David Hume," published in 1846, and 
a "History of Scotland from Agricola's Invasion to the 
Extinction of the last Jacobite Invasion." This appeared 
in successive volumes between the years 1853 and 1870, 
and is the best History of Scotland that has yet been 
written. There was also John Sherren Brewer, born in 
1810, who took orders, became Reader at the Rolls, Pro- 
fessor of English Literature at King's College, London, 
and died in 1879 soon after presentation to a vicarage in 
Essex. Professor Brewer distinguished himself by his- 
torical research in many forms, and chiefly as editor at the 
Record Office of the Calendar of State Papers for the 
Reign of Henry VIII. In this labour he is succeeded by 
a younger historian who has done sound work of his own, 
James Gairdner. Historical and other papers contributed 
by Professor Brewer to the "Quarterly Review" were 
published in 1880. Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy, born in 
1812, published in 1851 a popular history of " the Fifteen 
Decisive Battles of the World." He died in 1878. Charles 
Merivale, now Dean of Ely, born in 1808, published in 
1850-62 a " History of the Romans under the Empire," 
and in 1875 a " General History of Rome from the Foun- 
dation of the City to the Fall of Augustulus." Connop 
Thirlwall, who died Bishop of St. David's in 1875, and 
whose " History of Greece " published first in " Lardner's 
Cyclopaedia" (1839-44) was the best before Grote's, was 
but three years younger than Grote. He was born in 1797. 
His History retains its place among the best books of the 
reign. 

Sir Arthur Helps, born in 1817, ranks as a historian for 
his " Conquerors of the New World and their Bondsmen," 



344 OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

published in 1848-51, and his "Spanish Conquest in 
America," which followed it in four volumes between 1855 
and 1861 ; but he is perhaps best known for his thoughtful 
essays and dialogues upon questions of the time, " Essaj^s 
written in the Intervals of Business," 1841 ; " Claims of 
Labour," 1844; and "Friends in Council," 1847-51. "The 
History of the Five Great Monarchies of the World " is 
among the writings of the Rev. George Rawlinson, who 
was born in 1815, and is still active. So is Austen Henry 
Layard, born in 1817, who delighted all readers in 1846 
with his account of researches in Nineveh. 

Thomas Wright, who was born in 1810 and died in 
1877, supplied readers in the reign of Victoria with many 
valuable studies of past life and Literature. He was 
educated at Ludlow and at Trinity College Cambridge, 
where he graduated in 1834. Already as an undergraduate 
he had begun to write, and he was honoured by many 
learned societies of Europe. He was in 1842 and 1856 
the first editor in this reign, of " the Vision of Piers 
Ploughman," since edited with the most exhaustive care 
by the present Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge, the 
Rev. W. W. Skeat. He edited also in 1839 "the Politi- 
cal Songs of England from John to Edward II.;" "the 
Latin Poems of Walter Map," in 1842, and his " De Nngis 
Curialium," in 1850 ; " the Chester Miracle Plays," and the 
''Owl and Nightingale" in 1843; Occleve's "De Regi- 
mine Principum " in 1860, and other important pieces of 
our Early Literature ; besides giving to the general public 
several useful and amusing books, such as the "History 
of Domestic Manners and Sentiments," in 1862, and his 
" Histroy of Caricature," in 1865. 

Peter Cunningham, third son of Allan Cunningham the 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTOBIA. 345 

poet, was born in 1816, became a Clerk in the Audit office 
in 1834, and was Chief Clerk from 1854 to 1860, when he 
retired. Of many books by him illustrative of the past, 
the most widely known was his " Handbook of London." 
He died in 1869. Among living students of the past 
there were at the beginning of the reign, Edward Augus- 
tus Bond, then aged 22, now Chief Librarian of the British 
Museum ; Henry Octavius Coxe, then aged 26, among 
whose valuable services to English Literature was an edi- 
tion of Gower's "Vox Clamantis " in 1850. He succeeded 
Dr. Blandinel as Chief Librarian of the Bodleian in 1860, 
and held that office until his retirement in 1881. Samuel 
Birch, now keeper of the Oriental, Mediaeval and British 
Antiquities in the British Museum, Avas born in 1813, 
and has written valuable works in his own department 
of study. Sir Thomas Erskine May, born in 1815, should 
rank rather with the Historians than with the Antiquaries, 
for his " Constitutional History of England since the Ac- 
cession of George HI.," a continuation of Hallam, published 
in 1861-63. He has written also a work of highest author- 
ity upon the "Law, Privileges, Proceedings, and Usage 
of Parliament." The present editors of the " Edinburgh " 
and " Quarterly " Reviews, Mr. Henry Reeve and Dr. 
William Smith, were young men of twenty-four years old 
at the beginning of the reign ; and John Thaddeus Delane, 
who edited "the Times" after the death of Thomas 
Barnes in 1841, and himself died in November, 1879, was 
twenty. 

William Edmonstone A3^toun, who was born in 1813, 
became Professor of Rhetoric in the University of Edin- 
burgh in 1845, and died in 1865. He produced in 1848 
his "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers," which have passed 



846 OF ENGLISH LITERATUEE 

through about twenty editions. His " Bon Gaultier Bal- 
lads," written by Aytonn and his friend Theodore Martin, 
were hardly less popular ; and when a young poet, Alex- 
ander Smith, who had a touch of genius injured by over- 
straining for effect, found imitators, Professor Aytoun 
wrote, in 1854, a whimsical parody on the spasmodic style, 
called "Firmilian, a Spasmodic Tragedy." Aytoun mar- 
ried the youngest daughter of John Wilson (Christopher 
North), and among his friends was Theodore Martin whom 
he joined in the work of translating the " Poems and Bal- 
lads of Goethe." 

Theodore Martin, — now Sir Theodore, — born in 1816, 
practised law in Edinburgh, and settled to law business in 
London in 1846. He distinguished himself by the work 
done with his friend Aytoun, by metrical translation of 
his own from Horace and Catullus, and from German 
poets. He has translated Goethe's " Faust " and Dante's 
" Vita Nuova," and he has written, by Her Majesty's com- 
mand, from papers and letters placed at his disposal, the 
" Life of the Prince Consort," of which the first volume 
appeared in 1874. Of this large work, since its recent 
completion, a People's Edition is being issued in five six- 
penny parts. Wide as is the knowledge of the worth of the 
laborious and earnest man who used the utmost influence 
of character and position for the well-being of his adopted 
country, yet this closer study of his life deepens the preva- 
lent impression. The reign of Victoria has aided life and 
literature by highest example of a Queen who has been at 
all points womanly, and against whom the one complaint 
of the thoughtless is that she remains devoted to the mem- 
ory of a husband in whom every Englishman has found 
a pattern of true manly worth. It is well that in such a 



IN TUE REIGN OF VICTORIA, 347 

reign womanhood has been worthily represented also in 
our Literature. Life speaks through literature with its 
true voice in the works of Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell, 
" George Eliot " and Mrs. Browning. The strength of one 
such writer overweighs the weakness of a hundred triflers. 
Monckton Milnes, now Lord Houghton, was twenty-eight 
vears old at the beg-innino^ of the reisf'n. His ''Poems" in 
two volumes were published in 1839; "Poetry for the 
People," in 1840 ; " Palm Leaves," in 1844. Other living 
workers who belong to this group of men are John Stuart 
Blackie, born in 1809, the genial Professor of Greek at 
Edinburgh, who blends poetic instincts with his scholar- 
ship ; Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, born in 1810, whose 
" Horse Subsecivse," published in 1858-61, contained much 
good matter besides the often reprinted "Rab and his 
Friends," delightful alike to dogs and men, unless dogs 
cannot read. Martin Farquhar Tupper, author of " Pro- 
verbial Philosophy," was 27 at the beginning of the reign ; 
the Rev. William Barnes, author of " Poems in the Dorset 
Dialect," was 27 ; Alexander William Kinglake, who pub- 
lished in 1844 a delightful book of Eastern travel called 
"Eothen," and has since written a fidl History of the 
Crimean War, was 26. Sir John William Kaye, who pub- 
lished in 1851 the " History of the War in Afghanistan ; " 
in 1853 a book on " the Administration of the East Lidia 
Company," in 1864-70 a " History of the Sepoy War in 
India," and other pieces of Indian history and biography, 
died in 1876. The Rev. Mark Pattison, born in 1813, now 
Rector of Lincoln College Oxford, and author of a schol- 
arly life of " Isaac Casaubon," published in 1875, is still 
busy with useful work ; and the Regius Professor of Greek 
at Oxford, the Rev. Benjamin Jowett, has enriched the Lit- 



348 OF ENGLISH LITERATUBE 

erature of the Reign with what will remain the standard 
translations of the Dialogus of Plato (1871) and the His- 
tory of Thucydides (1881). 

To the same group belongs William Ewart Gladstone, 
born in 1809, and still most active among the active. 
Early in the reign, he published (in 1838) a work on " the 
State in its Relation to the Church." In 1851-1852 he 
called strong attention in two pamphlets to the arbitrary 
imprisonment of 20,000 of his subjects by King Ferdinand 
of Naples for political reasons. In 1858 he published 
" Studies of Homer " and in 1869 " Juventus Mundi : the 
Gods and Men of the Heroic Age." 

Charles Robert Darwin has gone farther back for the 
" Juventus Mundi." He was born in 1809, and is on his 
father's side a grandson of Erasmus Darwin, poet physi- 
cian, and on his mother's side a grandson of the great 
artist potter, Josiah Wedgwood. Charles Darwin began 
by publishing, in 1839, " Researches into Natural History 
and Geology during the Voyage of the Beagle." In 1842 
his book on " the Formation of Coral Reefs " was sugges- 
tive of grand operations of nature in the work of the small 
coral builders. His next study was of " Volcanic Islands." 
Then came, in 1845, "a Naturalist's Voyage round the 
World." In 1859 Darwin published the book that gave a 
new point of departure to scientific thought, " On the 
Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection ; or the 
Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life." 
He had been working at it since the days when he was a 
naturalist on board "the Beagle." Its suggestion that 
the continuity which former naturalists had observed in 
the scale of Nature was, in the case of animals, produced 
by gradual development from lower into higher forms, 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA. 349 

appeared to some people an argument against belief in a 
Creator ; but it in no way interferes with faith in a first 
cause. In 1862 followed a work " on the Contrivances by 
which Orchids are fertilized by Insects;" in 1865 another 
" on the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants." In 
1871 Charles Darwin wrote on " the Descent of Man, and 
Selection in relation to Sex ; " in 1872 " on the Expres- 
sion of the Emotions in Llan and Animals," and his last 
book, published in 1881, was on " the Earth Worm," whose 
great service is shown as an agent employed in the prepa- 
ration of the earth for man. Charles Darwin is a man of 
genius in the world of Science, whose place answers to 
that of a great poet in the world of Literature. 

Of the writers who were between ten and twenty years 
old at the beginning of the reign, Florence Nightingale 
was seventeen. Of her "Hints on Hospitals," in 1859, 
and " Notes on Nursing," the result of devoted care of 
the sick soldiers in the Crimea, more than a hundred thou- 
sand copies were diffused. Miss Charlotte Mary Yonge 
was fourteen. She published in 1853 "the Heir of Red- 
clyffe," and, like Miss Sewell, has been since generously 
busy in using her pen, as a novelist and otherwise, in 
aid of religion and religious education. James Anthony 
Froude, Historian of ''the Reigns of Henry VIII. and 
Elizabeth," and Edward Augustus Freeman were at the 
beginning of the reign nineteen and fourteen years old. 
Mr. Froude's History, in twelve volumes (1856-69) was 
followed, in 1872-74, by three volumes on "the English 
in Ireland in the 18th Century." The most important 
of many accurate and thorough books by Mr. E. A. Free- 
man is his " History of the Norman Conquest of England," 
in five volumes (1867-79). He has published also, in 



350 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

1881, a *' Historical Geography of Europe." To the best 
historical Literature of the Reign belongs also the series 
of works in which Professor Samuel Rawson Gardiner 
has studied the reigns of the two earlier Stuart kings of 
England. Henry Thomas Buckle, Matthew Arnold, David 
Masson and Henry Morley were all, at the beginning of 
the reign, fifteen. Henry Thomas Buckle died in 1862, 
having produced in 1858 and 1861 two volumes introduc- 
tory to a projected " History of Civilization " in Europe. 
Buckle's view of History was the reverse of Carlyle's, for 
he ascribed no influence to the independent force of char- 
acter, and pleasantly startled readers by extravagant state- 
ment of the half truth that all events depend on the action 
of inevitable law. He said also that the moral element 
was of less consequence than the intellectual in a History 
of Civilization, because moral principles are the same as 
they were a thousand years ago, and all the progress has 
been intellectual. Steam also is what it was a thousand 
years ago ; and intellect has developed the steam-engine. 
But where lies the motive power to which every ingenious 
detail has been made subordinate ? Matthew Arnold, son 
of Dr. Arnold of Rugby, has written some of the most re- 
fined verse of our da}^ and taken a chief place among the 
critics. He has aided the advance of education, and 
touched questions of religion. The chief work of David 
Masson, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in 
the University of Edinburgh, is his Life of Milton, told in 
connexion with the History of his Time, in six volumes, 
begun in 1859 and finished in 1880. It is a storehouse of 
information, laboriously sought, carefully weighed. A 
seventh volume will consist wholly of Index. George 
Macdonald and William Wilkie Collins, two living novel- 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTOBIA. 351 

ists of high mark, and George Macdonald, poet also, were 
boys of thirteen at the beginning of the reign. Sydney 
Dobell, who gave much promise as a poet and died in 
1874, was also thirteen. Wilkie Collins's "Woman in 
White," published in 1860, remains, perhaps, the most 
famous example of that skill in the construction of a 
peculiar form of plot which excited, at last, the emulation 
of Charles Dickens, who was in "Edwin Drood" a fol- 
lower of his friend Wilkie Collins. Among living men 
of science, John Tyndall was aged seventeen, and Thomas 
Henry Huxley twelve. Edward Hayes Plumptre, divine 
and poet, now Dean of Wells, was nineteen. William 
Hepworth Dixon, Avho died in December 1879, after an 
active literary life during part of which he edited "the 
Athenseum," was sixteen. Philip James Bailey, who pub- 
lished in 1839 the remarkable poem of "Festus," was 
twenty-one at the beginning of the reign. John Westland 
Marston, a dramatic poet who has produced several good 
plays on the stage, was seventeen, and John Orchard 
Halliwell-Phillips, one of our ablest and most patient 
students of Shakespeare, was seventeen. Charles Kingsley 
and " George Eliot " were eighteen. 

Charles Kingsley was born in 1819 in the vicarage of 
Holne on the border of Dartmoor. After being at school 
in Clifton and Helston, he was sent to King's College, 
London, and went thence, in 1838, to Magdalene College, 
Cambridge. He graduated with high honours, took a 
curacy at Eversley in Hampshire, where in 1844 he 
became rector. In that year he married. In 1847 he 
■first made his genius known by publishing a dramatic 
poem, " the Saint's Tragedy," upon the story of St. Eliza- 
beth of Hungary. In 1848 he was stirred deeply by the 



352 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUBE 

events of the new Revolution in France. There was a 
menacing Chartist movement in England, and Kingsley, 
joining himself with F. D. Maurice whose books had 
strongly influenced his mind, laboured to put Christian 
life into the masses, while showing sympathy with their 
best hopes and knowledge of the evils that then cried for 
remedy. Kingsley's "Alton Locke," in 1850, and his 
"Yeast," in 1851, represented the stir of the time, and 
showed what it meant in the long struggle towards a 
better life on earth. Other novels and poems followed : 
"Westward ho!" in 1855; "Two Years Ago," in 1857; 
" Andromeda, and other Poems," in 1858. " The Water 
Babies, a Fairy Tale for a Land Baby," in 1863 ; " Here- 
ward the Wake," in 1866. There were books also that 
helped to diffuse his love of nature, as " Glaucus, or the 
Wonders of the Shore," in 1857; with writings upon 
social history and volumes of sermons. In 1859 Charles 
Kingsley was appointed Regius Professor of Modern His- 
tory at Cambridge, and also Chaplain in Ordinary to the 
Queen. In 1869 he obtained a Canonry in Chester. In 
1873 he became Canon of Westminster. In January 1875 
he died. A fitting biography was published by the com- 
panion of all his thoughts, his widow, in 1879. 

" George Eliot " was the name taken by a novelist of 
rare genius whose maiden-name was Mary Ann Evans. 
She was born in November 1819 at Griff near Nuneaton 
in Warwickshire, where her father was land agent and 
surveyor to several estates. When she was about fifteen, 
her mother died, and she was youngest daughter in the 
house. She went to a school at Nuneaton, and removed 
with her father, in 1841, to Foleshill near Coventry. 
The elder children then were all married, and at Foles- 



JiV THE JIEIGN OF VICTOniA. 353 

hill she was alone with her father, from whom she took 
some features for her Caleb Garth in " Middlemarch." 
The head master of the Coventry Grammar School gave 
^Miss Evans lessons in Greek and Latin. She tanght 
herself Hebrew ; learnt French, German and Italian from 
another master ; and music, in whicli she took intense 
delight, from the organist of St. Michael's church at Cov- 
entry. Her chief friends at Coventry were a gentleman 
and his wife, of high intellectual and personal character, 
who both wrote useful books, and in whose house she 
found the intellectual society she needed. But her friends 
had put aside the Christianity to which at Nuneaton she 
had been strongly attached. The society at the house 
of her friends was intellectual and sceptical. Another 
friend was found, whose influence was yet stronger in 
the same direction. Taking up the unfinished work of 
a daughter of her new friend's, Mary Ann Evans com- 
pleted a translation of Strauss's "Leben Jesu," which 
was published in 1846. Such work brought her at times 
to London and into the society of thinkers like those 
whom she had learned to respect at Coventry. Li 1849 
her father died, and she left Foleshill. Her home then 
was with her Coventry friends till 1851. She then re- 
moved to London, to assist Mr. John Chapman in editing 
a new series of " the Westminster Review." This brought 
her next into relation with George Henry Lewes. 

George Henry Lewes, born in 1817, had begun the 
world as clerk in the house of a Russian merchant. He 
had an active, eager intellect with equal appetite for 
Literature and Science, but none for the counting-house. 
He left business ; studied in Germany for a year or two ; 
and then began to write, producing many books and con- 



354 OF ENGLISH LITEBATUEE 

tributing to many journals. He wrote " a Biograpliical 
History of Philosophy," of which there was an enlarged 
fourth edition in 1871. In 1846 he wrote two novels, 
" Ranthorpe " and " Rose, Blanche, and Violet," in 1847 
and 1848, a Tragedy, "the Noble Heart," which was 
acted at Manchester in 1848, " a Life of Robespierre " in 
1849. He was enthusiastic for the Positivism of Auguste 
Comte, and published a book on " Comte's Philosophy of 
the Sciences," in 1853. The Philosophy of Comte has 
also strong supporters in a few able and earnest English 
thinkers, subject to impulse originally received from some 
enthusiastic students of Wadham College, Oxford, who 
have carried out their ideal in afterlife. Its aim is gen- 
erous and just. It is, indeed, little more than the French 
crystallization into a single and harmonious theory of the 
main thought of our time, that only by the fidelity of 
each one to the highest sense of duty Ave advance Hu- 
manity. To most people this is a part of religion ; to 
Comte it was the clear and perfect whole, expressed in 
formulas, and shaped into a science, of which the worst 
enemy can only say tliat it is a truth but not the whole 
truth, and a truth that, rightly acted on, can only work 
for the well-being of the world. 

What was fascinating in this doctrine, Miss Evans felt. 
She joined her life to that of Mr.. Lewes by a faithful 
bond, though there were reasons why it could not have 
" the social sanction." In 1856 the first work of " George 
Eliot" — "Scenes of Clerical Life" — was offered to 
"Blackwood's Magazine," and the first of the three stories, 
"Amos Barton," began to appear in 1857. In January 
1859 " Adam Bede " was published, and " George Eliot " 
took her place in the front rank of English novelists. 



IN THE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 355 

"The Mill on the Floss " followed m 1860; " Silas Mar- 
ner," in 18G1 ; " Romola," in 1863; "Felix Holt," in 
1866; "The Spanish Gipsy," a poem, in 1868; "Middle- 
march," in 1872, "Daniel Deronda," in 1877, and in 
1879, "Impressions of Theophrastus Such." Mr. Lewes 
had founded in 1865 the " Fortnightly Review " — after- 
wards made monthly, without change of name — for the 
purpose of bringing within one journal both sides of the 
discussion of all matters that concerned the general well- 
being. The conception was a noble one. It was fol- 
lowed by the establishment, in 1866, of the " Contempo- 
rary Review," Avith like purpose but with a religious bias, 
as in " the Fortnightly " the bias would be Positivist. 
These were followed yet again by another monthly, in 
1877, " the Nineteenth Century," which vigorously labours 
also to bring the best minds of all forms of thought into 
council with the public. In May 1879 Mr. Lewes died. 
In May 1880 George Eliot was married to an old and de- 
voted friend, Mr. John Walter Cross. On the 22d of the 
following December she died after a short illness. 

George Eliot's novels are admirably various in their 
scenery. They now paint Methodist life in the days of 
Wesley, now Mediaeval Catholicism in the days of Savo- 
narola, now the whole range of the Jewish nationality. 
They are alike in their rich play of humour and pathos, 
in sympathy with the varieties of human character, in the 
spirit of humanity that is allied with every honest aspira- 
tion ; they are alike also in the steadiness Avith Avhich 
every one exalts the life that is firmly devoted to the 
highest aim it knows. Again and again, there is the type 
of the weak pleasure-loving mind, too easily misled, and 
of the firm spirit, capable of self-denial, true to its own 



356 OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE 

highest sense of right. George Eliot's novels will cloud 
no true faith; they are the work of a woman of rare 
genius whose place is, for all time, among the greatest 
novelists our country has produced. 

John Ruskin, who was born in 1819, and began his 
teaching when he published his "Modern Painters," in 
1843-46, has in all his writings used his genius as faith- 
fully. Beginning with the warning to painters, that they 
should show truly the forms of clouds, and trees, and 
mountain ranges, he enlarged his teaching from the first 
by application of it to sincerity of life. Where he seems 
least reasonable, what we call his unreason, comes only of 
the firm upholding of a single thought. One truth in 
Art and Life, — for Art like Literature, is but the speak- 
ing breath of life, — one great truth, is enough for one 
man to uphold. " We are not sent into this world," says 
Ruskin, "to do anything into which we cannot put our 
hearts. . . . There is dreaming enough, and earthiness 
enough, and sensuality enough in Innnan existence with- 
out our turning the few glowing moments of it into 
mechanism ; and since our life must at the best be but a 
vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes 
away, let it at least appear as a cloud in the height of 
Heaven, not as the thick darkness that broods over the 
blast of the Furnace, and rolling of the Wheel." That 
thought is none the less true for a dozen errors in the 
application of it. \ 

There was a like sense of life in Mrs. Browning's " Cry 
of the Children." The first book of poems to which that 
true poetess set her name, " the Seraphim," represented 
voices of the angels as they looked at Him who yet hung 
dying on the Cross at Calvary. Out of the depths of 



IN THE EEIGN OF VICTORIA, 357 

Christianity came her plea for the higher life of man. 
Her call for union of the thinker with the worker, the 
idealist with the man eager to provide for each day's bit- 
ter need, gave to her poem of " Aurora Leigh," published 
in 1857, a tone blending with the thoughtful music of her 
husband. Robert Browning in his '' Paracelsus " showed 
the failure of one who desired at a bound to reach the far 
ideal ; in " Sordello," showed the poet before Dante, seek- 
ing his true place in life, and finding it only when he 
became leader of men in the real battle of life, and poet 
all the more. If there be no full civilization to be won. 
on earth by those who shall come after us in distant 
years, yet Ave must labour on, not dreaming, but doing. 
And to the poet we must go for utterances of the soul of 
action ; for no true poet is " an idle singer," and no day 
" an empty day." 

Let us not wrest unduly from their sense these words 
of Mr. William Morris in the prelude to his "Earthly 
Paradise." Mr. William Morris's poems have their own 
great charm, but have not 3-et the greatest. Mr. William 
Morris was three years old at the beginning of the reign, 
and he has yet to set the crown to his career among the 
poets. Nor let us leave unnamed the witty novels of 
George JNIeredith, the womanly novels of Mrs. Craik, the 
pleasant songs of William Allingham, and the verse music 
of Jean Ingelow, who were all children in 1837. 

Thomas Hughes, aged fourteen at the beginning of the 
reign, was a boy under Dr. Arnold at Rugby, and has 
since helped to quicken a new generation with the spirit 
of his teacher, in the most popular of his books, " Tom 
Brown's School-days " first published in 1856. It was 
followed, in 1861, by '* Tom Brown at Oxford." 



358 OF ENGLISH LITEEATUBE 

Among novelists who are now active and whose works 
are widely enjoyed, Mrs. Henry Wood was of the same 
age as " George Eliot " and Mrs. Eliza Lynn Linton, 
daughter of the Vicar of Crosthwaite, in Cumberland, was 
fifteen, at the beginning of the reigJi. Of the same age 
was Miss Frances Power Cobbe, who has been an ener- 
getic and imaginative writer upon social questions. Li fic- 
tion, indeed, the Literature of our day has received large 
contributions from the lively fancies, quick sympathies, 
and shrewd observation of character, among English 
women. It is doubtful whether the general reader, who is 
encouraged even by many erudite writers to treat Chris- 
tian names as of no consequence, will ever distinguish 
clearly between Miss Amelia Blandford Edwards, born in 
1831, daughter of a Peninsular officer, and Miss Matilda 
Barbara Betham-Ed wards, born in 1836, whose " Kitty," 
when it first appeared. Lord Houghton enthusiastically 
praised as "the best novel he had ever read." These 
excellent writers really do live separate lives, each has a 
distinct style of her own, and they are not the Mrs. Ed- 
wardes, who is also well known as a novelist. The Baron- 
ess Tautphoeus, who also writes good novels, is fairly safe 
from the risk of a confusion of this kind. 

Lady Georgiana Fullerton, second daughter of the first 
Earl Granville, has also written with refinement ; and 
Miss Harriet Parr (Holme Lee), who published her first 
novel in 1855. Miss Georgiana Craik began to write 
novels in 1859 ; and we have biography as well as fiction 
from Miss Julia Kavanagh, who was born in 1824 and 
died in 1877. Mrs. Oliphant has been already mentioned, 
on page 270, as one of our novelists of finer strain. Miss 
Mary Elizabeth Braddon achieved her first success with 



IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA, 359 

" Lady Auclley's Secret " in 1862 ; " Ouida " with '' Stmth- 
more " in 1865. Miss Rhoda Brougliton began to write 
novels in 1867, and Miss Florence Montgomery in 1870. 

Giovanni Domenico Ruffini, born in Genoa in 1807, 
made England for some time his home, and enriclied the 
literature of our time, in 1852, with an admirable book, 
"Lorenzo Benoni," which was follow^ed by other stories. 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, son of a distinguished commen- 
tator upon Dante, was born in London in 1828 ; liis broth- 
er, William Michael Rossetti, in 1829; his sister, Christina 
Georgina Rossetti, in 1830. Dante Rossetti is poet and 
painter ; his brother is an active critic of poetry and art ; 
his sister Christina is a poetess of no slight mark. 

George John Whyte-Melville, who was born in 1821, 
and died in 1878, began his successful career as a novelist, 
in 1853, with " Tilbury Nogo, Passages in the Life of an 
Unsuccessful Man." Mr. Whyte-Melville was Captain in 
the Coldstream Guards when he retired from the army 
in 1849. 

Richard Doddridge Blackmore, son of a clergj-man in 
Berkshire, graduated at Oxford in 1847, was called to the 
bar at the Middle Temple, and practised as a conveyancer 
before publishing his first novel, in 1864. 

William Black, sixteen years younger, was born at Glas- 
gow in 1841, and came to London as a journalist in 1864. 
He was special correspondent of a London daily paper at 
the seat of war, in 1866, and published his first novel in 
1867. In 1871 he attained a great success with his 
''Daughter of Heth," and since that time he has main- 
tained his place among the best of living English novel- 
ists. The characters of journalist and novelist are joined 
also in elder men, in two who have both w^orked under 



360 OF ENGLISH LITEBATURE 

Charles Dickens, and been counted among his friends, the 
lively and energetic George Augustus Sala, who is essay- 
ist and novelist; and Edmund Yates, who looks also at 
life and literature as novelist and journalist. 

Among the novelists there are to be remembered also 
Hamilton Aide, James Payn, and Thomas Hardy. Justin 
MacCarthy, born at Cork in 1830, has not only won hon- 
ours in fiction. He completed in 1880 a " History of Our 
Own Times," in four volumes, which has already gone 
through many editions. 

With all this thought for present amusement there has 
been throughout the reign a steady increase of attention 
to the past. Societies have been formed for the reprint 
and study of our Early Literature, and in this way no man 
has done more faithful and energetic service than Fred- 
erick James Furnivall. Professor Edward Arber, of Bir- 
mingham, not through Societies, but by his single personal 
devotion to the work, as at once Editor and Publisher, 
has diffused 140,000 copies of cheap editions of rare pieces 
of old English Literature. Professor Alfred J. Church 
has told afresh the stories of Herodotus, Homer, the Greek 
Dramatists, and Vergil, in books equally delightful to the 
scholar and the child. 

And there still lives in the England of Victoria the 
spirit that made Elizabeth's England dear to Richard 
Hakluyt. The loss of Sir John Franklin, in 1845, with 
all record of Search Expeditions down to MacClintock's 
"Voyage of 'the Fox,'" published in 1859; the Journals 
of David Livingstone, and records of those exj^lorations 
to which he gave up his life in central Africa ; have added 
volumes of deep interest to represent the Life of England 
in the Literature of the present reign. 



JiV TUE BEIGN OF VICTORIA. 361 

Of the writers now strongly representing English Lit- 
erature who are true Victorians, John Morley, born in 
1838, who has written faithful studies of the literary 
movements that preceded the French Revolution, and has 
just written a thoughtful and honest "Life of Richard 
Cobden ; " William Edward Hartpole Lecky, born also in 
1838, who published in 1865 his "History of the Rise of 
Rationalism in Europe," in 1869 a "History of European 
Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne," and in 1878 a 
" History of England in the Eighteenth Century," main- 
tain the spirit of historical research, and faithfully apply 
their studies to the life of their own day. Archibald 
Forbes, born also in 1838, represents the skill and cour- 
age of the modern Newspaper Correspondent. Algernon 
Charles Swinburne has long since taken his place among 
the poets. There will be no want of faithful work as the 
generations follow one another. The author of " the Epic 
of Hades " will sing other songs as pure as those by which 
he earned his fame, and rising with the years in power. 
Even while these lines are written, a poem in " the Nine- 
teenth Century," called '' Despair ; a Dramatic Mono- 
logue," bears witness to the abiding vigour of our Laureate, 
the history of whose work covers the history of half a cen- 
tury, dating from the volume of " Poems ; chiefly Lyrical, 
by Alfred Tennyson," first published in 1830. Tennyson's 
verse has shown the way from death to life through the 
sustained song of immortality, his " In Memoriam ; " has 
once more spiritualized our national romance hero, and 
associated tales of Arthur with the king within the human 
breast. Among poets of the Reign of Victoria he too has 
worn his laurel as a " blameless king." 



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